City Scapes, a collection of interpretations of the life and soul of the city, will make its debut in Kensington Market this weekend.

Photographer Tanya Sillers' exhibition of work expressing the "excitement of urban life flashing by" opens at Moonbeam Coffee Company on Saturday and runs until Tuesday, April 8.

New to professional photography, the self-taught Sillers, 45, took up the craft two years ago at the urging of her artist husband, Michael. "His encouragement got me started - he handed me some paints and a camera and told me to go to it," she said.

And to it she went, scouring the city aboard a streetcar in search of shots reflecting the living beauty of the world, while balancing strength with subtlety.

"I take pictures from the streetcar because I find it affords good, open angles," she said. "I just get a bunch of tokens and grab my camera. I basically used to live on the streetcar anyway, going here and there all over the city, and what I noticed was that the speed of the city - it moves so fast - was symbolized really well by the movement of the streetcar."

Some of her favourite sites to capture the buildings and people that make up the city she loves so much, she said, are Kensington Market, Queen Street and the College-Carlton area.

The best of the resulting images are cropped and printed on fine art paper using archival links in limited editions - creating prints that last longer than traditional photographs, she said.

"Watercolour paper also offers a more textured and grainy quality to the images and makes the colours more muted," she said.

"My approach to photography is very traditional. I don't play around with the images or their colours too much - what you see is what you get, and I like that."

City Scapes is showing from Saturday, March 15 until Tuesday, April 8 at Moonbeam Coffee Company, 30 St. Andrew St. in Kensington Market (north of Spadina and Dundas). A reception will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. on Saturday, March 15 at which the artist will be present. For more information, go to www.pollydude.com