Robin's Weir

Police officers create a bicycle cordon to stop the demonstration before the protesters could reach the torch relay. (Robin Rowland/CBC)

The torch relay reached the blockade and waited for about half an hour. Then the organizers and police decided to reroute the relay across Wellesley and then down University Avenue to its destination of Toronto City Hall.



A few hundred demonstrators shouting "No Olympics on stolen native land" stopped the Olympic torch relay on Toronto's Yonge Street Thursday night, forcing the relay to be rerouted. Here the lights of the lead police escort vehicle shine through a demonstrator's banner.  (Robin Rowland/CBC)

After about 20 minutes, the protest leaders called on their followers to disperse, but it was about another half hour after that they did leave and traffic resumed on Yonge Street.

Related link
More photos of the protest  from Brett Gundlock on his blog

CBC Photo gallery
Transit chaos  Toronto subway shut down  Nov. 18, 2009

The skyline of Toronto,  taken from my garret home office on the afternoon of Nov. 11, 2009. This picture can only be taken in late fall, once the leaves are off the trees and the sun is setting in the right place.  Not that good in the spring, as by the time the sun is in the right location the trees are beginning to bud.

In Toronto, the place to be late on Halloween night--for adults--is Church Street, the heart of the city's "gay village" (although most gay people who live in the neighborhood  still call it "the ghetto"). 

Just a few years ago, when the city began closing off Church Street for the traditional gay and lesbian celebration of drag and costume, the celebrations were largely confined to the city's LGBT community.  Now all that has changed.  Like Pride weekend in the summer, the celebration of scary diversity now draws people from all over the Greater Toronto Area and this year what appeared to be many straight couples joined the parade of costumes.

(Times have changed since the days  in the 1960s and early 1970s when a mob with smelly eggs and rotten tomatoes would gather to pelt  the drag queens  and others entering the bars on Yonge Street on Halloween.  At the same time, as seen in in this 1973 report from CBC News, as shown on CBC Archives,  "Drag Queens on Halloween" the  gay pride movement was already growing. (Runs 8:24 and requires Windows Media Player) )

Halloween was on a weekend this year and that meant Church St. would be even more crowded.  So I headed down to Church St.

 With the experience of  Pride in my mind,  I knew that several hundred thousand people crowded into three blocks make it hard to use even the sturdiest of DSLRs.

 So instead,  I packed my carry with me everywhere camera, a Panasonic Lumix FZ28.

In my opinion,  the FZ28 is a perfect back up point and shoot camera. I can carry it in a fanny pack, whip it out, and use the 18x optical zoom to get a good shot. Past experience has shown that I can push the FZ28 pretty far.  So on Halloween night in all those crowds, I had a small camera that was fairly unobtrusive which meant I could get candids.

Most of the public would ask someone to stop,  so the photographers could take their pictures. (and there were usually a crowd of photographers with everything from Iphones to DSLRs complete with flash and Fong hoods as seen in this shot as a flash goes off as photographers capture some high feathered drag performers.)

The basic settings I was using for the FZ28  were:

• ISO 1600
• 1/40 second, shutter priority
  
• Exposure value  +1.5

Once I got home,  I ran all the images through Noise Ninja  before processing the images in PhotoShop CS4. In most  cases, other than increasing the exposure value even further in CS4 Camera Raw, I made minimal adjustments  (colour temperature was tweaked slightly only in a couple of the images). For those images that did not look that good in full colour, I converted to black and white in Camera Raw and those came out looking as if they could have been taken anytime from the 1950s to the present.

Shooting available light wasn't really that scary after all and, of course, available light gives you a much better feel for the atmosphere for the night of All Hallows on the darkened streets of Toronto.

To see a complete slide show of the best images from Halloween on Church St. 2009, see the show on my PhotoShelter site.

Or you can check out the thumbnails as well

Here are a few of my recent photo galleries for CBC News.

Taking on the H1N1 flu  photographs from the H1N1 flu lineups at Metro Hall in Toronto on Oct. 30, 2009, plus wire photos from around the world.

Hot Toys of 2009

The annual show by the Canadian Toy Association of  what the trade group believes will be the top toys for Christmas 2009.

The Canadian International Air Show 2009

The annual Canadian International Air Show at Toronto's CNE, in 2009 celebrating 100 years of powered Canadian flight.

IBM's smarter planet ad campaign had been on television for sometime, with "ordinary" folks from around the world talking about smarter cities, smarter everything, to be answered by others saying "I'm an IBMer."

While I am a CBCer and have worked for many years under the expanding C logo of  Mother Corp,  also known as the CBC Pizza (and sometimes less flattering terms).   The CBC for those who are unsure is th e Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

It was only on this weekend the I noticed that the IBM ads appearing in The New Yorker has one smart idea that has a very close resemblance to the CBC pizza logo.Here's the original multi-coloured design.

One interesting question is, if the ads began appearing in The New Yorker in September (the one above is from the Sept. 21 issue) how was IBM able to anticipate the colours in the CBC's new look?  ( as seen in this photo gallery  of  behind the scenes images from the launch  by Toronto photographer Christopher Wahl.)

This is just the second recent example of a major brand borrowing from the CBC.  The Brand New blog reported on Oct. 12 that Stella Artois is also using a slices of the pizza in its ad campaign on the walls of the London Tube.




A couple points for the record.

Brand New points out that the CBC logo was created by Burton Kramer in 1974.  Original link is on the Canadian Design Resource site.

And here is the scan of the complete IBM smarter ad from Sept. 21 issue of The New Yorker.