I have always loved taking long exploratory walks around urban neighborhoods, no matter whether I have traveled to a faraway place or I am happily acting like a tourist in my own city. I don't necessarily always plan to collect photos, but they seem to be inevitable. The simple act of moving, observing and being in the moment fuels my creativity.

Knowing this, I have gotten into the habit of scheduling a seasonal "staycation" -- a mini vacation (sometimes just a day or two, sometimes a whole week) in my own city of Montreal, where I devote time to exploring different areas and appreciating how they change with the seasons. 

In the mood to stretch my legs and to spend a little time outdoors with my camera, I signed up for one of the Photowalk Montreal group itineraries, organized by graphic artist and photographer Elodie Le Pape.

Every month or so, a new itinerary is proposed to explore a different facet of Montreal. Essentially, you meet up with a group of people on a Saturday and take a leisurely 2-hour walk together, snapping photos of whatever inspires you.

When I met up with about 24 strangers at metro Mont-Royal for that day's "Colors of the Plateau and Village" itinerary, I felt a bit outside my comfort zone. For me, photography is usually a solitary act. It is how I unwind, how I practice mindfulness, how I pay attention to my posture, and how I reflect on my way of seeing and feeling things in this world. When I travel, I usually carve out time to walk around with my camera on my own. If I'm in a group, I make mental notes of where to return to when I have more time to observe and experiment. Being such a solo photographer, I had no idea how it would feel for me to be part of a large group of photography-lovers. Would I keep the pace and find inspiration without feeling pressured? Would there be a lot of discussion and comparison? Would be end up with extremely similar photos?

What I quickly noticed when we set out on our photowalk was that the atmosphere was pleasantly informal and relaxed, such that you could make the experience whatever you wanted it to be. For this group, it doesn't matter if you're a beginner or an expert, if you have a cell phone or fancy gear, or if you simply feel like going for a stroll (thus totally ditching the "photo" part of a "photowalk"). You can take your time (as long as you don't lose the group), and be as talkative or as quietly focused as you wish. ​If city photography is not your thing, you are totally free to take portrait photos with a buddy, while scouting out interesting backdrops for future photoshoots. 

I admit that it was still an odd sight to watch 25 people silently fill a narrow street and spread out into different directions like ants infiltrating a space! Some photographers were much more assertive than I was, climbing residents' staircases for better views, getting really up close and personal with their subjects. 

I stayed true to my usual style -- looking for unique compositions and details that highlight colors, textures and that celebrate the ordinary. I appreciated that there was room for every type of photographer, and that the photos would reflect our individual styles, in the end.

The highlight of the photowalk was to discover a couple of charming streets that I had not yet explored. I was so glad to have done something outside of my creative comfort zone. It was a refreshing exercise to try something new but to still find my unique perspective and style within that new experience. 

Since the photowalk, I have enjoyed a few leisurely walks on the Plateau, Little Italy and around the Parc Olympique, taking in the miracles of spring. It always astonishes me how a little bit of time outside, away from my screen and phone, can refresh my mind and spirit. (Though, between you and me, it can be a little overwhelming to come home to hundreds of new images to sort and process!) 

I am often asked for advice for beginner photographers, and I almost always say this: take long walks and practice. Whether you join an organized photowalk for a structured itinerary, or you just weave in and out of streets on a whim, you are sure to find inspiration if you are open to it. Once something makes you slow your step, capture it in different ways -- different angles and compositions will tell a different story, and different camera settings will teach you about light. Finally, always look with your eyes first. Especially when the goal of the walk is to take pictures, it's easy to become a hurried collector and snap, snap, snap. Slow down, relax your shoulders, look at the scene and pay attention to how it makes you feel. What draws your eye naturally? Try to recreate that with your lens.

But, most of all: have fun. No matter how your photos turn out, at least you've taken a nice walk through town!

I am frequently asked to give workshops or "tips" on how to achieve better photos. If you have been following me for a while, you know that the aspect of photography that I am most passionate about is composition and storytelling. The technical stuff is plenty fascinating and important (no one likes blurry or underexposed photos!), but the art of observing is key to photography. The technical elements can be mastered with resources and practice. The passion for observation comes from within. 

If I had to give only ONE tip, it would be to practice observing - to take photos without fear or self-judgment, just for the sake of observing, experimenting and learning. This tip is a valuable one for beginners and professional photographers. It is ultimately what allows photographs to convey feeling. 
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But today, I'm not giving you just one tip. I'm giving you 10. Here are some of my "photography mantras", which I practice daily. 

There is so much beauty in the ordinary. Still-life painters had the right idea to glorify the mundane! Celebrate the daily details that draw your eye. Look for patterns, lines, shadows and textures, and study how they change with the changing light. What treasure will you uncover?

Once you pinpoint what you want to photograph, give yourself the assignment of photographing it in at least 5 different ways. Vary the composition: include and exclude different parts of the scene. Vary the ratio: Apply the rule of two-thirds, then take a symmetrical photo. Try both a horizontal and vertical version. Vary your focus and make different elements of the scene stand out. Follow your subject as they move through the frame. It will be painstaking to review and compare these variations later, but oftentimes one of them really makes you say: "A-ha!" and it may not be the one you expected. 

Photography is a sport! You think inspiration will just come to you? Nope. Sometimes you have to get on your knees or risk your life on a precarious stool or circle around a spot peering into a puddle for a reflection. Jokes aside, testing out different vantage points, no matter the type of photography, will present perspectives you otherwise would have missed.

When we wanderlusters travel, we feel awe. Our senses get flooded, overwhelmed. We feel all sorts of emotions and want to bottle them up and keep them in our pocket forever. Although it seems effective to snap, snap, snap away, there is a lot of value in refraining from snapping and looking with our eyes first. What naturally draws our eye without the viewfinder? Is there an underlying story or feeling? When you do grab your camera, be sure to keep both eyes open, i.e., don't shut the one that is not looking through the viewfinder. This will keep you connected to the scene. It will also allow you to monitor anything peripheral to your frame that you may want to include, or that may intercept your shot.

Here's a technical tip, albeit a broad one. Whatever device you choose to work with, whether it is a phone, an entry-level camera or a pro camera, use the technical manual and get to know its features to use it at its optimal capacity. That way, you will know when you have outgrown it and are ready to upgrade. 

In any photographic style (travel, portrait or event photography), the most memorable shots are usually the unplanned and candid ones. Give yourself time and flexibility for the shot to come to you. Plant yourself, wait for magic and be quick to capture it. 

When composing your shot, enhance the sense of depth by making sure the eye is drawn from the foreground to the background. You can achieve this by using leading lines that propel our gaze deeper into the scene, using a wider angle, or changing your perspective to emphasize some of the background elements. A greater sense of depth makes the viewer feel more connected to the photograph, as though they are in the scene itself. 

Whenever we look at a portrait photograph, we look at the eyes immediately. Everything else is secondary. For that reason, make sure you focus on your subject's eyes before framing your shot. 

You know what they say: rules are meant to be broken. Sometimes reading up on the do's and don'ts makes you feel like experimenting with all the don'ts! When you break the rules, you also break expectations, which allows you to stand out. But, most importantly: have fun with photography. Use it as a form of self-exploration and self-expression, and let the rest follow. 

Over the years, looking through a lens has taught my eye to see things differently, until that way of perceiving beauty became second nature to me.
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I have noticed how there are certain things that I am just drawn to photographing – certain subjects that recur in my photographs again and again, whether I travel far or take my camera for a stroll down the block.

1. Reflections

​What I love most about reflections is that sometimes they are obvious and right in my path, while other times I have to actively search for them – consciously changing my angle or height and hoping for a little bit of luck. Yes, I am that person who circles around a puddle (at least) twice, staring deeply into it like she has lost an earring (or her mind). I am incidentally also that person who looks like she’s spying on people through a window, or that she’s about to fall over into a canal…It’s almost always worth it, though. Reflections are little treasures that bring me a lot of joy.

2. Boats

​If you know a little bit about me by now, you know that I feel deeply connected to the sea. Port towns, fishing villages, colorful boats, anchors and nautical rope are among my favorite elements to photograph, quite simply because they are among my favorite things in life.

3. Decay

​My time with Venice has made me appreciate the raw beauty of decay and disrepair. There is something rather poetic about a place standing the test of time – faded, weather-beaten witnesses of a long string of days and all the wisdom that age brings.

4. Daily details

​One of the most important gifts my camera has ever given me is the ability to document even my most ordinary days and, through that act, to realize that simplicity is the purest kind of beauty. When I discovered my growing interest in photography, I made it a point to practice every day by committing to a 365 project – a photo a day. What we don’t realize between glorious snapshots are that some days – perhaps even most days – are utterly ordinary and uneventful. On those days, my photo subjects were random things like fresh laundry, folded sweaters, frost on a windowpane or pillows on my couch.

​I enjoyed the exercise so much that it became a habit, even on eventful days or incredible travels. I consider it a kind of mindfulness exercise, to notice and celebrate simplicity.

​The glorification of the mundane is a running theme in many of my photographs and in the writing that fills many of my journals; everyday beauty and daily details, in travels and in my own life, are often the snapshots that I appreciate the most when I look back on the year. 

5. Textures and patterns

​Looking through the lens really trained my eye to pick up on lines, patterns and textures, and to experiment with compositions that showcased them. I felt my tastes change over time; I became more interested in an urban, industrial feel, and played a lot more with lighting and with black and white to bring out the mood in those scenes.

​I love geometricity, hard patterns and soft patterns, perfect lines and imperfect lines. I love asymmetry as much as symmetry. What I love most is to be surprised when patterns and textures manage to make a statement in a photograph – sometimes even more than in the real-time moment itself. 

6. Shutters and balconies

​My fascination with shutters started early on, in Italy. Windows and shutters are portholes into a different view, the threshold between inside and outside, private and public. Balconies are often glimpses into the architecture of a city and the life of its residents. Best of all, my love for window shutters and balconies makes me lift my eyes up and around, in search of color, perspective and inspiring urban oases. 

7. Food

Food photography is my guilty pleasure – my secret dream, the skill I would leap into perfecting if I had the luxury of dropping everything else for a while. I can’t tell you how many times a month I am tempted to procure antique silverware, paint different kinds of wood slabs as tabletops and allow myself to lose track of time cooking, staging and photographing dishes in the natural light pouring in from the guest bedroom window.

Fun fact: Often one of my new year’s resolutions involves dabbling in new cooking and food photography projects. One year was the year of “Twenty soups”. Another year, I promised to make 12 kinds of risotto in the autumn and winter months (“Risautumn”).

My love for cooking began when I moved to Europe and lived on my own for the first time. My love for food photography was sparked by the magical cookbooks written by Tessa Kiros, photographed by Manos Chatzikonstantis and styled by Michail Touros.

8. Sunsets

​Sunsets used to plunge me into melancholy; I would watch quietly as the sun dropped to the horizon, feeling a very mild twinge of angst that the passing of time could be so blatantly visible to the eye. I have grown more accustomed to sunsets and to celebrating their beauty, even though I am still not fully comfortable with the series of milliseconds leading up to point where the sun suddenly gets pulled beneath the horizon. I childishly hate the idea that I can’t see something that was just right there. I enjoy photographing that series of milliseconds, as if to try and cheat time and freeze it, so the sun won’t actually dip out of our eyes’ reach.

What do you love to photograph?

​Tell me what draws your eye. I’d love to know.

From my heart to yours.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how much I love vivid, saturated colors and how they draw my eye.  It may seem contradictory, then, to devote a post to my love for the exact opposite of color – the monochromatic world of black and white!

Stripping a scene of its hues may feel impossibly dull for someone who loves the brightness and infinite variations of colors. It may seem unnatural to render a scene or a portrait colorless, not to mention counterintuitive to revert back in time – having made so much progress in photography in our hyper-colored, super-digital world, what on earth would we find appealing about deliberately recreating a historical limitation in the art?

And yet, so many photographers seek to master this style, as successful B&W images can be profoundly artistic in their storytelling and powerful in mood. What you strip away in color, you gain in feeling – or at least, that is how it should be when done successfully.

There is something generally attractive and valued in what is vintage, and something artistic in creating an image that is an imaginative alteration of reality. In doing so, photography suddenly gains the ability to become like a praised antique or reaches the rank of a fine-art painting or sketch. But merely transforming any scene into B&W is not enough. As I have come to realize after much experimenting and trial and error, not all images "feel right" in B&W. So what makes a B&W image give you that "YES!" feeling?

Most often, we are stimulated by color when we choose to photograph a scene. Be it in a natural landscape or an urban scene, the elements that grab our attention usually do so because of their color. Think about it – the ocean, nature, a street scene, an urban market, anything against a blue sky. Would you reach for your camera as often if your world had but two colors - black and white? What would you photograph, if anything, if your eyes were staring at a black and white scene? If you ask yourself that question next time you're out for a stroll with your camera, you may immediately notice that your attention shifts towards different elements: 

• Light, and the shadows and highlights it playfully creates. 

• Contrasts – not in colors but in tones. Think of the scene in terms of black, white and various shades of grey. The sky is often an interesting example of how this changes. What seems white on blue suddenly becomes more complex in B&W, with intermediate swirls of grey and deeper blacks in some spots but not others.

• Lines and patterns and textures and shapes. Some of my favorite friends! It is amusing and astounding how such "low-level" or basic elements can manage to enhance the mood of any image, or how removing one sense (color) can elicit new senses (tactile perceptions). 

• Fog, smoke, mist, raindrops. Any elements of a transient nature that are much too subdued to take center-stage in a full-fledged color photograph really seem to come to life in B&W. 

Imagine how easy it would be to overlook those subtleties if saturated blues and reds and greens were staring at you in the face, praying for your attention! I suppose this trains you to look beyond what you see – to peel away that first layer of reality in search of something more.

This is precisely the reason I love B&W. What you see is not what you get. Effort is required on your part to actually look. If you read a bit of the description 'about my snapshots', you already know how much I enjoy the power of simplicity in photographs. With B&W, what is simple and ordinary has a chance to be glorified, with a bit of experimentation and a lot of heart. 

I think that is also why I love experimenting with so many different mediums - acrylic, aluminum, canvas, wood, paper. All of these have different textures, different personalities, different affinities for elements that either become pushed into focus or that take a backseat. It's always interesting to watch the same piece get transformed in spirit when it is printed on a different medium.

In this post, one of my favorite B&W images is showcased on acrylic.

It is called "Sans Souci" (French for 'without worry'). The title has a double meaning. Not only is it the name of the Palace depicted in it (Schloss Sanssouci in Potsdam, Germany), but it was also taken during a season of my life where I very much felt like the world was my oyster and any dream was within reach. It was a year of a deep sense of childlike exuberance, a strange time of inexplicable connections and inspiration continuously slapping me in the face, as if holding up a sign that read, "This is your life – you are so fortunate". It was a brief moment of simplicity and peace that preceded a crossroads where a choice was forcibly made between two parallel worlds. I originally took this photo in color and later converted it to B&W. The result was an intense mood - a moment of stillness conveyed by the solid architecture, intersecting with the movement and change brought on by the sky. 

Acrylic is usually my medium of choice for photographs with crisp, vibrant colors. But with its perfect ability to preserve sharp details and enhance depth, it turned out to be a stunning choice for B&W. Depicted here is the thin acrylic option (sleeker and airier) with the floater frame (wood backing). The floater frame is invisible from frontal view, but impressively allows the acrylic to "float" off the wall. The standoffs, on the other hand, achieve the same "off the wall" effect, but add a more pronounced modern feel, as they are visible on each of the four corners of the art. 

So you see, B&W photographs may be devoid of color, but certainly not of life or feeling! Keep me posted on your impressions and on your own experimentation with B&Ws in the comments below!