The Scene
Who says you need a nine-hour transatlantic flight to get a taste of France? This July, we packed our bags and headed east to soak up some distilled joie de vivre in Montréal—and the city showed off.
Let’s address the elephant in the room: Montréal’s food scene beats Toronto’s on sheer availability alone, its transit system actually works (shots fired, TTC), and Old Town serves up enough cobblestone charm to fool you into thinking you crossed an ocean. What’s not to love? Exactly zero things. And don’t sweat it if your French ends at “bonjour” and “merci”—while a little French goes a long way, your English will get you everywhere you need to be.
Pro travel tip for fellow Ontarians: skip the five-hour highway haul and take the train. It takes roughly the same time, minus the heart palpitations. For reasons known only to the universe, local drivers seem to have studied at the Paris Academy of Vehicular Chaos. Grab a train ticket, snag an OPUS card, hop on the metro, and let your own two feet do the rest.
Our usual habit is visiting around “November-ish”—which is great if you enjoy freezing rain and existential gloom. But summer Montréal? An absolute revelation. It’s as if the entire population spent an Ice Age waiting for sunlight, and the second it cracked 22°C, everyone mutually agreed that indoor living was canceled. The parks are packed, the terrasses are overflowing, and the city hums with energy.
Sure, Montréal isn’t Toronto. It’s smaller, punchier, and distinctly its own beast. Locals wear their heritage proudly, which occasionally comes with that classic, Parisian-grade side-eye toward English-speaking road-trippers from Ontario. But scratch the surface, and they’re a delightfully warm bunch who genuinely understand how to savor life.
Bonus geography trivia to stash in your back pocket: Did you know France still technically owns land right off our shores? Just off Newfoundland’s Burin Peninsula sits Saint-Pierre and Miquelon—fully French territory where you actually need a passport, pay in Euros, and probably find the crunchiest baguettes in North America.
The Camera
Among the gear I dragged along was a Nikon F70D—a camera I bought for the sole reason that it’s a certified weirdo from the ’90s.
It comes equipped with a date stamp back, a so-called “panorama” mode, and an LCD display on top that looks less like a camera readout and more like the dashboard of an alien spacecraft. Naturally, I arrogantly assumed I could master the controls over a casual weekend. Spoiler alert: the manuals and grumpy forum reviews were completely right, and I was dead wrong. “Intuitive” is not in this camera’s vocabulary.
Don’t get me wrong—it isn’t a terrible piece of kit. It works smoothly, it takes legitimately solid photos, and it has that classic, reassuring “Nikon-fine” build. It’s just a delightfully odd duck paddling in my camera pond.
To dial up the drama of the “panorama” feature, I slapped on a 28mm prime (swapping to a 50mm when the mood struck), hoping some wide-angle theatrics would sell the illusion. Scroll down and be the judge: here’s a full frame with the panorama mode engaged, followed by the cropped result.
Let’s be real—I should have just bought a Hasselblad XPan, but my wallet took one look at that secondary market price and laughed in my face. We all know “cut the top and bottom off your 35mm frame” panorama modes were pure marketing gimmickry, but there’s still something wonderfully unhinged about it.
The Film
The summer sun was out, my stash was calling, and film doesn’t burn itself—so naturally, a few rolls of Kodak Vision3 made the trip. I could easily write an entire multi-volume love ballad dedicated to this cinematic stock, its absurd dynamic range, and those dreamy tones, but I’ll spare your scroll finger the essay. If you know, you know. ‘Nuff said.
The Verdict
Truth be told, these photos do not scratch the surface of just how much fun we had in Montréal. Consider this a glorified teaser trailer—more dispatches (and hopefully much better visuals) are heading your way at some point..
If you take only one thing away from this post, let it be this: go to Montréal in the summer. Seriously. Book the ticket. And whatever you do, pack a camera.
This specific camera? Yeah… maybe leave that one on eBay. I’ll keep the F70 around as a backup body, if only out of stubborn spite to see if I can eventually decode its cryptic menu without tearing my hair out. At the end of the day, the shutter clicks, the film advances, and it gets the job done. For a quirky little gear experiment, maybe that’s all we can really ask for.
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