ride around and take photos

Decairie Service Road

Saint Augustine of Canterbury Parish Church

It's fun to ride around and take photos, especially in an interesting city like Montreal. There's the adventure of being on the bicycle. One has to pay attention to avoid running into a pothole or getting in an accident. Motor vehicles regularly cut too close to the cyclist. Often when approaching an intersection, drivers position the vehicle so there's no room between the curb and the vehicle for a cyclist to pass. In such cases, Lohbado often went up on the sidewalk and proceeded to the intersection, rather than being trapped behind a line of vehicles waiting to make a right turn.


Often things appear more interesting while in motion than when one stops to take a photo. It's easy to take a lot of boring photos. It's not so easy to capture the inspiration one feels when out and about. A grey stretch of service road under a grey sky could be quite picturesque when out on the bicycle, in the roar of traffic, endless signs, store fronts and activity on all sides. Of course, the city involves a lot of repetition of bland uniform rectilinear forms without decoration. Certain places get photographed to death, especially the tourist stops.

A lot of photography has become generic. But that's not a problem. It's still fun to take photos, even for no other reason than to undertake an interesting activity. One could view it like jogging, or any other kind of personal discipline or daily activity. The reward is in the doing. Abandon expectations. Move around. Take photos. Relax.

Lohbado does mostly photos of objects and buildings, since it can be stressful to photograph people. Even people photos can be generic, the standard set of characters repeated endlessly, which is fine. That's not a problem. But there's no need to feel compelled to take a photo of that picturesque man and woman over there in the colourful outfits and expressive faces, since such photos have been taken at least a million times all over planet earth. So relax and take photos however you like. That's Lohbado's motto.