Entering Toronto, you’ll find yourself surrounded by inordinate construction, either towering above you as half-finished condominiums or lurking all around you in various public works convolutions. A decade-long building boom shows no signs of slowing— testament to the city’s will to keep up to its own growth and breathe life into its downtown core. Many designs seek to restore as they renew— architectural innovation meets heritage preservation, making for an exciting future. Nevertheless, it can all be just a bit overwhelming, so if you’re looking to bring things down to street-level (and human scale), here are some reference points for the labyrinth. On your walk, you’ll get a good sense of some of the Old Town’s most historic buildings, neighborhoods, parks, and landmarks.

​The Vault – One King West Hotel & Residence
Savings Department Safety Deposit Vaults
From the street, you may question your decision to stay at this historic hotel, but the gorgeous lobby and classy rooms will quickly win you over. It’s got a friendly little reception bar for a nightcap, and a beautifully restored hall at the top of a winding staircase for major events. The underground vault, built into bedrock in 1913, features a four-foot-thick steel door that weighs 40 tons, but can be moved with your little finger. Best of all, it’s as central as central gets.

Just up the road, you can get breakfast at a place that's been serving simple, classic and delicious fare for over 90 years: 

Shopping
​Located in the core of the trendy Queen Street West shopping district, Fashionably Yours specializes in buying and selling pre-owned, authentic designer clothing, bags, shoes, sunglasses, and other accessories by names like Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Hermes, and Gucci. Priding itself on its exceptional customer service, the store has been the recipient of numerous well-deserved accolades. A lifetime 100% authenticity guarantee is provided for all purchases.

Self-described as “your source for curated vintage,” Black Market, an alternative clothing store at Queen and John offers all its wares for $10 or less. T-shirts feature unique designs, and there is a fantastic selection of seasonal articles, like their famous holiday sweaters. The store also offers sweet vinyl finds from Shortstack Records and a professional silk-screening service with very reasonable rates.

​Speaking of vinyl, Toronto’s oldest Indie record store, Kops Records, has been around since 1976 and boasts the city’s largest stock of near-mint used records and value bins. 

​Toronto’s Old Town is one of the most concentrated areas of 19th century buildings in Ontario, including the site of the first Parliament in Upper Canada. The St. Lawrence neighborhood grew up around the still-standing market of the same name. 

Part of a restored historic corner of commercial buildings (est. 1840) at Front and Jarvis Streets, the Corner Place Restaurant and Lounge is a friendly neighborhood hangout right across from the St. Lawrence Market. Delicious burgers or eight-hour, slow-cooked brisket are perfectly paired with local beer and wine. Soak up some sun on their great people-watching patio; once you're fed and watered, you’ll be ready to continue your walk. ​
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Most of the images treat a similar subject, in this case, a building; if you plug in a picture of a red car, you’ll get mostly red cars parked in the same position. But then it gets more interesting. Looking at the examples, you’ll see that composition and geometry play a significant part, and that each picture has several such elements in common with others. Artists will connect with this immediately: strong perspective views, lighter fields of ‘sky’ or ‘ceiling’, squares, triangles, arches, and blocks of dark that contrast with the pallor of the overall image. ​

Finally, all of these images comes with a story: the Vietnamese village of 30 old French villas, a fleet of floating hotels on the Providence River, some Sci-fi guy who is building a model of a frontier power generator at a plasma plantation, a shop-front in the tiny Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, where the ratio of bookstores to residents is approximately 1:60… The possibilities for artists, authors and historians are literally endless.

Search by Image does return a list of the instances of a specific image online, much like Reverse Image Search by TinEye, which can assist the user in tracing rights owners or infringements. But it also scans the content of the image using some kind of magical algorithm. And this produces results that will be pleasing to all types of users with infinitely diverse missions. At the very least, it is likely to quench one's curiosity about all those snapshots of unanswered questions that tend to rattle about in an avid traveller's luggage. 

hundred wunders started out as a scrapbook for storing my good memories and doing something useful with the many albums of pictures I've taken over the years. Nothing intense, and much of the time it has simply been a nice place to visit. 

But with patience and dedication, hundred wunders has begun, slowly but surely, to live up to its name. I've been invited to write for travel websites, such as trip.com and GPSmyCity, spent a lot of hours wondering, but best of all, met a whole bunch of incredible people. This fascinating adventure recently inspired me to launch the hundred wunders brand and multiply the iterations of what can be done conceptually with archival photographs taken over the years and all over the world.

hundred wunders' leggings, dresses, scarves, gender-friendly baby clothing, and handmade soaps are all produced locally in Montreal, Canada, which helps to limit our carbon footprint. Our fashionable, eco-friendly leather bags are handmade by small, genuine leather crafters around the world. These manufacturers use vegetable tanning, a traditional process employed to tan leather without chemicals. Each satchel, duffel and backpack is unique, exhibiting its own grain, nuances and scars. The bags will be among the most reasonably priced and beautiful pieces of leather you will ever purchase.

​Who knows what else you'll find, off the beaten track? Welcome, and enjoy! And please, shop! In so doing, you'll be supporting some of the finest lesser-known artists and artisans of the world.

The creations in the hundred wunders collection are inspired by photographs of urban environments, representing otherwise random moments in city time. Each piece is completely original - you will not find either the concept or the designs anywhere else. A far cry from the standard framed print, although I love those too, they capture something precious about each of the strange cities I've travelled, mainly on foot. They are the canvas on which these pieces will live from now on.

​The 'architecture' series is the heart of the project, and it plays upon the notion of where the environment stops and the people start. The process involves transforming a single view of a place at a given moment, with all its qualities and limitations, to create a completely unique article of clothing that is true to that view: a snapshot of the city has been laid across cloth so that it can wrap around your body, making you one with the urban environment.
 

In fact, the Pemaquid-Bristol region looks a lot like Cornwall, very similar to the Fal estuary on the south coast. We even had a boat ride, to see the seals – but no ferry from St. Mawes! Lots of lobster and seafood, including fish and chips!

You don't get many chances to photograph real coal these days!

On our way, we stayed in the mountainous region of Jackson, New Hampshire. There is a funny little steam locomotive at the foot of Mount Washington, still puffing, complete with an engineer in a dirty face and overalls.

We spent one night in Jackson, New Hampshire, had dinner in the pub and listened to a local Irish folk band. The rest of the time was at Hawks House Inn, a comfortable, laid-back B&B near Damariscotta, Maine. The host was large, gregarious and couldn't do enough to make us feel at home, and the inn was busy each day. Breakfast was buffet style laid out on two large tables. Steve, the host, was very proud of his artisanal cereals and bread, all bought at the local farmer's market, he said, as was the selection of fruit. This was ideal for us since we could help ourselves to what we liked. Not having bacon and eggs each morning probably did our figures some good, and every little bit helps these days!

As you can see, the sun shone every day, which apparently is not particularly typical of the coastal region of Maine. While this is about the closest we are to the ocean, it is still almost exactly 600 kilometres away, so not an afternoon's drive.

We were lucky with the weather but here at home, we REALLY need some rain. It has been a consistently hot, dry summer and the gardens have suffered, in our case due to the heat, but also because of the ravages of the plant pests which such hot weather seems to encourage. Sigh! We can't have it all...

GPSmyCity.com publishes iOS and Android apps featuring self-guided city walks in 700+ cities worldwide. Once installed on your GPS-enabled mobile phone or tablet, their apps turn your mobile device into a personal tour guide. With over 5,500 city walks available, GPSmyCity.com is the largest travel portal of its kind. Each city walk offers a precise route map guiding you to the famous attractions, monuments and interesting sights as well as hidden gems; as if you had brought along a local guide. No need to hop on a tour bus or join a tour group!

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That's all there is to it!

POLAROID TRANSFER PRINTS  

Polaroid image transfers are created by migrating the dyes in the emulsion of a peel apart print to a receptor surface such as watercolour paper. The resulting one-of-a-kind image looks like a combination of photography and painting.

Capturing the moment is the photographer’s interest, but mainstream photography has usually focussed on the subject and its treatment. Film isn’t the most tactile or flexible medium. Processing requires planning and the results depend largely on a rather distant manipulation of the elements, literally fumbling around in the dark with tongs and hypersensitive chemicals.
   With the emergence of digital photography, the potential for image altering and editing becomes infinite. In some ways, this plethora of options could be interpreted as freedom from the limitations imposed by more archaic methods, but it also adds such complexity that a single vision becomes difficult to achieve. Push against this medium and it doesn’t push back – it adapts and expands. Only the artist can decide which moment out of a million is worth preserving.

CYANOTYPE PRINTS

In her work, photographer Jane Linders revisits the relationship between subject, medium, and process. The cyanotype of the Brooklyn Bridge below is printed on a page torn from a 1939 Sheet Metal Handbook. Cyanotype prints are a crude photographic process during which an absorbent surface is soaked in a solution of water, potassium ferricyanide, and ferric ammonium citrate to render it photosensitive. Objects or negatives are placed on this surface and exposed to light (traditionally sunlight) and then the material is rinsed with water. The result is a white print on a blue background. The process was widely used for copying architectural plans, the origin of the term blue print, and adds an additional layer of interest to Linders' series of architecturally themed images.