Heipei

I find myself going back to these magical days we spent walking through the streets of Paris. Even more than the beautiful photos from Canada this year, my shots from Paris evoke so many wonderful memories of this magnificent city.

I’ve gone back and re-edited a lot of the shots I took in Paris. As you can see, I aimed for a slightly warmer look, with some minor split-toning going on. Also I didn’t try to correct the over- and underexposed areas that much. I will definitely have to go back in summer, when the skies are blue and not as bright as on overcast days.

As much as I’m looking forward to other places (Italy in particular), I can’t stop thinking about going back to Paris. Next time I will take along my 60D as well as a tripod (maybe). I know the beautiful locations now and I’ll probably set aside a whole day just for shooting on the Montmartre. De Vetpan showed me the kind of beauty you can capture there if you arrive at the right time of day (and year) and just look for interesting angles. His Hasselblad medium-format shots were eye-opening for me in terms of (gentle) post-processing, composition and color.

For me, Paris was the most beautiful and interesting city I visited yet. Since I have a mild case of architecture fetish, I was able to marvel at the beautiful bright buildings in every street as if these were that much different from the street we just came from. I know that Paris has it’s ugly sides: The banlieues, some of the Metro stations and probably a few other spots. But everything in the city just fits together perfectly. The streets are not too wide, there are beautiful parks every few hundred meters and there are many shops and restaurants. As much as I loathe living in big cities, I guess that Paris would be one of those places where you could actually be happy (if you can afford it).

In terms of photography I find myself torn between different choices: When to take my X100, when to take my 60D, how to edit a particular shot when other styles would fit nicely as well. Recently I have been thinking about this blog and whether I should go with a small and relatively static landing page instead, only linking to my blog, my flickr-account, my tumblr, etc. I’ve also started using static blog software for the fun of it, but I’m still not convinced that these tools can replicate the user experience of WordPress for me.