5 March 2019 – Oh, I know: every smart-phone photographer clicks off streams of shadow shots. (Right  up there with reflection shots.) But if the sun gets to play with shadows… why shouldn’t we?

Out for walkies with visiting Toronto friends. Brilliant sunshine bounces off the jagged angles of the Coast Range mountains, the flat flow of False Creek, and every intervening structure its busy rays can find.

All along the pedestrian bridge near Olympic Village, for example.

Later we join other friends on Lonsdale Quay in North Van, for a visit to the Polygon Gallery.

Light pours through letter-slot windows in the gallery roof, which is as jagged as the mountain range to which it pays tribute. A construction crane punches its way into the geometry.

And then out we go again, to wander The Pier, adjacent to the Gallery, a repurposed venue on the site of the former Versatile Shipyards with several piers and docks still part of the complex.

Shadow plays one way on a textured concrete surface …

and another way, really quite pointillist, on mesh.

At the end of one pier I start fantasizing a music group, mid-performance.

See? Those harbour crane “giraffes” along the left horizon are the back-up singers, who know that back-up also means background. Meanwhile the lead singer, the sun, shoots across the water to smack into the railing and fling shadows forward onto the pier — creating an eager audience to applaud the show.

Right, enough fantasy. Back to what is really in front of me.

Sometimes a shadow curves with a railing …

sometimes it marches in stiff angular formation …

sometimes it gets to stun a bench seat with a right hook.

And sometimes (often, in fact) it has to just roll its eyes and patiently allows yet another dilettante photographer …

to play Daddy Long Legs.