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Worldwide Photowalk

Photography | August 23, 2008

Today I spent two lovely hours walking through Vancouver's Gastown (verging on Cracktown) for the world's first worldwide photowalk. The idea behind the walk is that someone in the city guides a bunch of photographers (amateur and pro) on a walk and they all snap their hearts away. There were more than a hundred cities participating in the walk, with each walk having 50 participants (at most).

I had a great time trying to look through the lens at my current home city with fresh eyes, snapping at everything I thought might make an interesting picture, and remembering that even everyday things could be part of an amazing image. In fact, I took so many photos and stopped so many times along the way that I ended up only walking about 500 metres, and had more than 200 photos on my camera at the end of it all.

The results of the walk are fairly satisfying, with a couple of good pics in there. As a bonus, when we stopped for lunch at the Steamworks Pub we got to talk to some of our fellow walkers and ended up making a couple of new friends who we're hopefully going to do a couple of mini photowalks with in the future (mini in size, not time or distance).

I would thoroughly recommend this type of activity to anyone with even a tinkle of photography in their eye because it's not only a great way to meet people, it's so cool to share your pictures afterwards and see how everyone else looked at the same streets you walked that very day.