Sunday, February 19, 2017

Toronto Light Festival


It's hard to get people to get out of their houses in our cold Canadian winter, even if the area to head out to is as fashionable as the Distillery District. So when I learned of the Toronto Light Festival, happening over there, I just waited for the right evening to head down there. Tonight the temperature was a balmy 12 C in the evening (very unlike our usual February weather!) so we decided to check it out.

 
The Distillery District is often the choice for bridal photo shoots and couple engagement pictures. It has an old work charm, with brick buildings and trendy shops and cafes.



The light festival has on their website one simple statement.

Winter sucks, and we simply want to make winter not suck so much. And oh, we really like pretty lights.


And I have to say, they got it right. The exhibits were bright, spirited and fun. And it was crowded (it was a nice evening) and everyone was taking pictures (and selfies) with all the cool exhibits.


My favourite was the ring of lights. It took some positioning (and practicing my crowd navigating skills I picked up in India) to get myself into the right spot to take the pictures I wanted.


Another crowd favourite were the tiger exhibits. I couldn't take every shot here that I wanted as it was simply too busy and our children decided they had enough and wanted to go home.


There were just white lights hidden underneath paper sheets (of different colours) held on a wire-frame structure. I know these were paper sheets as one girl accidentally managed to damage one of them!


There was no name to this next exhibit, but it was a series of images of an athlete doing some running and jumping.




Overall the Light Festival was fun (and free). Parking nearby was $2/hour. We spent nearly two hours here and while we finished seeing most of the exhibits, we didn't manage to check out some of the exhibits there were housed indoors. It's a great spot to spend some of the now not-so-sucky winter nights. On a crowded night, budget easily 3 hours here, especially if you are into photography.

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