Paris!!!

I'm in a phase with my photography where I'm just lost.  I no longer have the time or money (especially the money, but also the time, ok it's both, I have neither) to pour into this hobby of mine.  I take pictures and then they sit on my hard drive for months.  I'm sitting next to seven rolls of undeveloped film that just needs to be dropped into the mail.  I find myself leaving my cameras at home more and more.  

There are a million reasons why I feel this way, why I feel lost.  For one, I started a new, stable job.  My last job was so unstable, so unpredictable, so frequently terrifying in its lack of security and potential to do very bad things to me and my family (I'll never directly tie my work to my housing again) that I had to have something else, an outlet that I could see growing into something more.  I worked and I worked and I worked at becoming a better photographer in the hopes that I'd be able to make money doing it.  It was a fantasy that I needed to keep pushing forward at work.  But now the new job is stable, I could do this work for years, and my wife started a new job at a different school, so we've diversified our employment portfolio.  If one of us loses our job, we're not homeless.  Things are good.  

And it makes me lazy.

Luckily, I get to work through these issues all over the world.  This summer Sara and I went to Spain and France and I took pictures in Paris, in Barcelona, in Madrid, all over the place.  It was awesome.  Looking through them all, I still can't answer the question of why, but hey, it was Paris.  It was the Louvre, and the Eiffel Tower, and the Champs Elysees, and there were millions of other people there with cameras, all taking pictures, all doing it for some...reason, I guess.

The goal in Paris was bravery.  In a city where everyone is taking pictures, I wanted to get closer, get braver, and take advantage of my ability to hide in the packs of photographers.  

As always, here's a few pictures.



If I could live anywhere on Earth, it'd be Paris.

It was August and it was busy.  My goal was to simplify, simplify, simplify, cut out the distractions and the background noise.  It's easy when the model stands still for hundreds of years.
It's the Louvre.  Very busy, we did not go in.

Another one where I tried to simplify the shot, by showing a bit of the crowd, but tried not to let it overwhelm the shot.

Sara and I did not deface any bridges on our trip.

This was a cool scene, one afternoon we walked by this statue and it had a red blindfold tied around it's eyes.

It's very important to not get run over when trying to get one of these shots.

Parisian version of an ice cream truck, complete with smoking dude giving zero fkcs.

Sara and I walked a ton in Paris and we walked to a few neighborhoods we haven't been to before.  We were just walking down the street and then we were like, "Hey, prostitutes, in the middle of the day, no big deal."

Korea has a chain of "bakeries" called Paris Baguette.  Not even close Paris Baguette, not even close to the real thing.

I love Paris because usually all the chairs face the street.  Cafes are designed for a person to sit and look out at the street, at the people, maybe at some absurdly famous monument.

I always set myself the goal of copying some iconic shots.  Just to do my version or my take.  Here's my take on the Eiffel Tower.



So there it is, a few pictures from our trip to Paris three months ago.  Hopefully it doesn't take me another three months to post again.  



3 comments:

  1. Great pics. I think you crushed the Eiffel Tower shot.

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