My favorite photography location in Montreal. Of course it would encompass food and (unrecorded) coffee.

There is a food market in Montreal that I found to be very much fun to visit, look at, photograph and play in. We took the Metro to the Jean-Talon stop on Tuesday morning, then walked a few blocks more to find the outdoor market. As the weather was still in the 50's and the day was sunny and nice, there were no winter walls up, no space heaters, no big coats to lug around. The whole market was wide open, breezy and top lit by hard daylight diffused through the white tent tops. As I understand it, the market at Jean-Talon is the biggest (and nicest) open air market in the city. Regular people flock here to buy the freshest produce, specialty foods, and things like maple syrup candies. The place is spotless, welcoming and a wonderful riot of color. 

We got to the market around 9:30 in the morning and started walking slowly through row after row of produce, flowers, and cheeses. I was hesitant at first to just snap away with my camera so I slid into my picture taking slowly to gauge how welcome or unwelcome it would be. In the markets in San Antonio there are even signs at vendor stalls attempting to forbid photography. It was definitely not the case in Montreal, at Jean Talon. I felt welcome everywhere. Especially so if I took the time to greet the vendor and smile. We struck up conversations with a young man who grew up in Calgary and suggested a car trip from Calgary through the mountains to Vancouver (sounds great). Belinda chatted for a while in Spanish with a vendor who moved to Canada from Guatemala about 20 years ago. He gave us hot peppers to take home (coals to Newcastle?). We spoke to a women who came from the south of France to follow her fiancé. They're moving back to France after he gets his degree... We spoke to the shopkeeper who made me one of the finest cappuccinos I've ever had. The conversation was universal; all about how friends change and vanish after they get married and have kids.

Each person we engaged with gave us samples, told us stories and suggested interesting places to see. I should have taken notes so I'd be prepared on our next trip back.

My camera and lens choice of the day was predictable: the only camera I brought was a Pentax K-1 (no back-up!!!!!) and I had a choice of only two lenses. I brought the 28-105mm for the day and it was beyond perfect. I'm just getting a handle on how sharp and snappy that zoom lens is. It's one of the best performing standard zooms I've used. I can see that the camera is making some big corrections for distortion and vignetting but with a 36 megapixel sensor there's a lot of information available to manipulate and I haven't seen a downside to the "computational" correction of the lens's few faults. 

Everything in this post was done with that lens. From close ups to more distant shots, it just flat out works. After spending the two previous days with this particular camera in my hands I find I've gotten used to it much more quickly than I anticipated. Pentax offers some weird controls and weird features but you don't have to use them. You can use the camera in the most straightforward fashion and never get bogged down with menus.

I actually gave up being a control freak for a while and used a mode setting that's marked, "TAV." It's essentially the same as having Auto-ISO in manual mode. You set the aperture you want and the shutter speed you think is best and the camera attempts to change the ISO to provide correct exposures. It's fun and mostly accurate but I often find myself wanting images that are darker than normal so I can mess with them without them breaking down in post production.

So, without further ado, here is my small gallery of initial takes from the Jean-Talon market. 

Belinda achieves mastery of the Canon G15. I tried to get her to 

take along the Fuji X-E3 and the 18-55mm but she says, 

It's too big.