Another early morning out with my spherical camera before dawn. Not much before dawn, unfortunately, but I'll try harder next time.

This is the former home of the Brunswick House, a popular bar for University kids before it became a drug store, which is the fate of everything in Toronto that can't become a condo. Now it's less useful than the bigger drugstore two short blocks over, but it's also vastly less crowded and doesn't hate its customers nearly as much. These days it's where I prefer to go for anything that it sells.

For this short walk I forgot my phone at home, which is awkward because the Theta depends almost entirely on its app for settings and entirely for its viewfinder. Fortunately I had just installed the firmware update that lets the camera listen for a generic bluetooth remote, so I was able to trip the camera from a distance, and I had turned on its shutter sound so sometimes I could even hear if it worked. But otherwise I had no idea whether what I was doing was recording anything at all – even less feedback than with film cameras.

Nothing's open 24 hours any more, so it's not the alluringly-presented meatless "Sausage and Egger" that forced the local A&W to close. Probably.

I use two crops for Theta images. The wide is a 5:2, which lets me crop out most of the confusion at the bottom of the photos and still show the full circle around the camera if I want to. The edges of these photos wouldn't quite touch if you wrapped them into a cylinder, but it would be close. And even the middle photo, which is my usual 16:10 (40:25, actually) shows more than 180 degrees horizontally.

I'm not sure when this part of Bloor will be rebuilt to match the fancy new section between Spadina and Bathurst, but with these condos coming in it's bound to happen. And knowing this city, it will be at an awkward time.

The blue hour in the morning is very short, and the weekday morning city was busier than I liked, so I headed home after only about 45 minutes on the street. You can't quite see where I live in these shots, but it's close.

The Venn diagram of Toronto drivers who complain about bike lanes, and those who rejoice in parking in them, would be a circle. This driver was quite happy to block the road in a 'no stopping' zone to get a morning coffee. I'd say the police should hang out outside of these shops to hand out tickets, but they don't do that here. I have watched police park in bike lanes so that they can go get their coffees, though – and yes, I have a photo of that, too.

At least it was a very nice sunrise this morning… which is what I was setting up to photograph when this Sealtest brand ambassador showed up. Good things never change.