Montreal In Pictures

May 10 2012

I’ve been wanting to go and shoot the McTavish Reservoir pump house at night following shooting it during the day back on April 17.

Despite it raining, I decided tonight would be the night. I hadn’t had time to shoot anything all day and needed to go and shoot something anyway, so as the reservoir is close to home, this seemed like a good idea.

The only problem was when I got there I found a large marquee had been erected on Rutherford Park behind the Chateau styled pump house and obstructed the view from the location I had planned on taking a shot – Primarily, so as to include the Montreal skyline in the background. So I had to make a quick plan change and decided instead to shoot from the road – it turns out that only the front is lit at night anyway. The lighting cycles through different colors: blue, green and pink. Here is the pump house in a vivid shade of pink.

McTavish Reservoir pump house at night

I’m not a fan of rain, but I do like seeing the reflections on wet surfaces and was quite pleased how the pink came out in the road on this shot. This image was a 3 exposure merged HDR and I ended up having to mask in the sky and car light trails from the shorter of the exposures due to the amount of traffic that passed by while I was taking the shots. So it ended up being a more time sucking post processing job than I had wanted and still could do with further dodging and burning in places…but it’s late and I think this will suffice for the days pic.

Here it is in green from another angle. Actually, it’s probably more turquoise since in one of the 3 exposures the building was blue

McTavish Reservoir in Green

Since the reservoir is located on a hill, you actually get quite a good view of the city skyline. So I decided to make my way up the embankment and took the following shot. The old curved building in the foreground is the Redpath Museum that I plan to visit and grab a few dinosaur shots – if they allow photography.

Montreal night skyline from McTavish Reservoir

The last few pictures I managed to take before it started raining harder were around one of the McGill University buildings on Docteur Penfield.

In the front of one building is a statue of a pair of fighting rams. I wasn’t that happy with how the shot came out but did like the pink and green of the trees.

Fighting rams sculpture at McGill

I spotted a metal railing leading up to one of the McGill campus buildings that was lit along its’ length and decided to shoot through the center. A shot that was more of an experiment at the time, I actually thought came out quite well.