52:500c – Week 42 – Royal City

Guelph, Ontario. Not a name of a city that you would think of being related to “Royal” but there it is. Guelph’s downtown is a unique one in Ontario as well and one that I’ve been wanted to include in a ’52’ project since the second one I did. But it never materialized so here we are on my fourth one and I finally had a chance to include it!

Despite sounding like a bodily function, Guelph does have some royal connections with the name. Guelph comes from a Bavarian familial name Welf, or the House of Welf, who’s younger branch is the House of Hanover of which the reigning British Monarch at the time of the city’s founding was a part of, so the nickname of “The Royal City” stuck. The city is also odd in the layout of the downtown core, or the historic center of the town. It uses a radial layout, so the streets branch out from a central point like in Detroit or Buffalo. It makes it pretty terrible to navigate on foot or in a car.

But the crown jewel of Guelph is the Cathedral of Our Lady, standing tall above the whole downtown. It’s why whenever I visit the downtown I park near the Cathedral because no matter where you are in the city you can see the cathedral and can generally get yourself back there.

Hasselblad 500c – Carl Zeiss Planar 80mm 1:2.8 – Rollei RPX 100 @ ASA-100
Ilford Ilfosol 3 (1+9) 5:00 @ 20C
Meter: Pentax Spotmeter V
Scanner: Epson V700
Editor: Adobe Photoshop CC (2015.5)