Boston Road Trip - Day 1

I’ll be doing something different with my Boston road trip blog posts. I’ll do 3 posts, one for each day of shooting we had and I’ll post up the images as I went along and took them. We’ll see how it works out =)

So the background story goes like this: I entered an image in a contest being run by Pinhole a few months ago. I ended up in third place thanks to the votes of many supporters and friends (you guys rock!). The top 20 got a free seminar and other goodies in Boston on December 5th and were then eligible for a trip to Hawaii to shoot for Maui Jim. Cool, right? Even better, a friend of mine and great photographer, Didier, finished second in contest and also won the chance to go.

As it’s a five and a half hour drive down to Boston from Montreal, we decided to make it a long weekend of it and left on Friday afternoon.

The ride was pretty quick and painless, not much out of the ordinary happened other than Didier convincing a manager at McDonald's to sell him some hot mustard (can’t find any in Montreal), which he scored 43 packets for like $2. Score! Sadly, no images of the hot mustard packets...shame on me, I know.

We got to the hotel around 8:00pm, the Holiday Inn Express in Beacon Hill. Staff was great, room was cheap (thank you hotwire!) and more importantly, it was in the downtown area which meant we didn't have to drive. We checked in, relaxed a bit, and then took out our cameras and tripods and went to town.

I've known Didier for many years, in fact, we first met in grade 6, but we had never done any urban city shooting like this before. We have done weddings, we have done other events, but never anything like this, so I was psyched. We picked a few areas of interest to start out photo walk as we were driving to the hotel. We walked in the area a bit and ended up around the Bowdoin subway station. Love the Massachusetts spelling of French names. Here, we write it Beaudoin, but phonetically, it is Bowdoin. Anywhoots, it was an open space with a few interesting buildings around.





We then made our way into Quincy Market, which was apparently light up a few days ago with the holiday lights. Took some shots from outside the market, inside the market, were told by a lame security guard to move on as the stores were closed and we weren't allowed on the second floor balcony (although we did manage to get out shots).







Last time I was at Quincy Market, it was packed with people as it was about 1:00pm. I think we got in there around 9:30pm, so it was pretty empty





The great thing about doing photo walks is that you make your way down streets and you really have no clue what you will see or where you will end up. I like to think that I let inspiration be my guide. Or I have a “oh, shiny object, let’s go there” way about it. You detour, take your gear our, snap some shots, and then either move in a new direction or the direction you came from. Its freedom baby, yeeeaaaah (Austin Powers anyone? - ok, lame I know, but I'm not deleting it). We found a small alley which was rightfully titled "Public Alley 101". Man, these Bostonians are so schmart. Great light, somewhat of a dark mood.



See, even ugly alleys can have such character and interest.
We kept moving down the street, taking images of whatever tickled our fancy and ended up at the TD Garden. It was quiet at first, but within a few minutes of being there, the Celtics game ended and a sea of people came out of the building. They were playing da Bulls and won the game, so the crowd was pumped. We had time to take some images of the Bobby Orr statue in front, but we were then hesitant to leave our gear out with the hoards of beer drinking fans coming out of the building. So what did Didier do? Start to take pictures of the fans and got some to gather by the statue, handed out some business cards and made people happy. Was pretty fun to watch.



I recently got an iPhone and have been loving doing iPhonetography. *Note - must make a blog post about that*. So I took some images here and there with my phone. Some came out not too bad, so I'll insert them here and there in my posts



We had already been at it for over 2 hours. Man time flies. After having driven for 5 hours to get here, we were starting to feel a bit tired. While we could have kept on shooting, we knew that our Saturday was going to be a full day of street shooting. This was supposed to be a relaxed walk to stretch our legs after the drive.