Walking the walk in Paris - Before Sunset

My one full day in Paris I followed the path taken by Jesse and Celine in the movie Before Sunset... it took me all over Paris but it starts at the wonderful Shakespeare and Co book store in the Rue de la Bucherie just opposite Notre Dame:



I strolled across to Le Pure Cafe at 14 Rue Jean Mace and it was as quirky a cafe as you are ever likely to find and well worth a visit:




Then I walked to Le Viaduct des arts which is a converted old railway line - the overhead line is now a narrow park and underneath are shops. It's almost invisible so you won't realise it is there unless you know it is - the park is well worth walking through:




In Paris, graffiti is different to the other places I've been. You have to look high up as much of it, as this shot shows, is at roof top level - and that's five or six stories high:



Stencil art is also popular. Last year I captured a large wall of graffiti in Paris which included a Shepard Fairey piece of stencil art. What a blast to have seen it and to have a photo of it. This year, this is one more addition to my stencil art collection.



And, at first glance this doesn't look like graffiti but it is. The building is abandoned and derelict and this graffiti and a couple of pieces of stencil art (can you see the cat?) decorate one side of the building:



The Place des Vosges is like Paris' backyard. When you come here, Parisiens are sitting in the park, running around its outer edges and kids are running and playing. It's the most amazing place, tucked as it is just off a very busy street but very peaceful and green. I love entering it through the lovely gardens of the Hotel Sully - go through the hotel entrance, across the courtyard, straight through the arch and past the bookshop and out into the hotel garden. In the bottom right corner facing you is a small archway which takes you direct to the Place des Vosges - you simply won't know you are in Paris and entering this way makes you feel like you're in the know!

These are some reflections from the Place des Voges, the gardens are gated and around them is a road and around that a courtyard of beautiful buildings. The gardens themselves are probably an acre or two in size:









These are the beautiful gardens of the Hotel Sully - I'm standing at the entrance to the Place des Vosges looking back to the Hotel itself:



Here are some colourful and quirky things I found. First of all - just what are you supposed to think will be the result of drinking THIS soft drink?



You have to wonder what Neo and Trinity were doing in Paris - I never did quite work it out but they were on ads at metro stations and on the back of every third bus - too strange!



I love getting up and out early in the morning. You see things then you just don't see later in the day. Here are the ubiquitous cafe chairs piled up ready to be set out for the day:



Sure, can do:



Finally, some rooms built out of the side of a building - the colour were so unexpectedly modern, the remainder of the building not so..

Basilique Sacré-Coeur, Paris

I'll admit I fell in love with Sacre Coeur the day we visited it in Paris. While I could give the tourist trap parts of Montmartre a big miss, Sacre Coeur is magnificent. It stands tall over Paris and it's such a beautiful building.

We were so lucky to be there on a day when cute little puff ball clouds dotted the sky. It was a scene that called out for my fish eye lens. I love this lens. It has such a wide angle that it sees so much - more than the human eye can in terms of angle, and it does funky things to buildings at the very edge of the image. With it you have so much creative potential that it's worth lugging it around for 3 days and only using it a couple of times.

This image is here for Andrew Chow whom I met on a flight recently from Orlando to Los Angeles. We got talking - he was from Hong Kong originally so we had plenty to talk about and he was checking out some of my photos when I was organizing them. He really liked the ones of Montmartre.. so this is for you Andrew.. Enjoy!

Color that rocks! Autumn in Paris

Ok, this post is Color that Rocks not Color that Pops.. I am really really sick of hearing the word POPS, it is officially Over, Out, Done, Finished - Gone!

I have to hold myself back from screaming "No! No! No! can't you find another word" whenever someone uses it. Seriously, we need something different, it is so overused.

Ok, Rant [officially] over.

This photo is yummy.

I shot it in Paris in, duh! Autumn. The colors took a lot of work to bring out but they are dazzling. Next work I do on it will be to remove the people. I love them... it gives the image a sense of life ... but a friend doesn't - so they are going.

I have used this image as an example for the color change tool in Photoshop. Open an image to change colors in and choose Image > Adjustments > Selective Color. Now you can select colors in the image - yellows for example and add red or green or blue to them. Select any color and add more of something else to it.

This photo turns from Autumn into Spring in a few minutes - bypassing Winter entirely!

If you make your changes on a duplicate of the image then you can blend and control the effect with a layer mask. So simple and so effective.

At The Opera

This beautiful photo was taken at The Opera in Paris. It was early morning and I was walking past as I saw this beautiful statue. There were bars between me and it and the photo isn't actually in very good focus. But there, a bit of work in LAB and it looks just fantastic.

BTW, as I was working on this image, I encountered a problem - I couldn't save a copy as a JPEG. Yikes! what is happening here? I thought about it for quite a while, then discovered I hadn't moved back to RGB from LAB color - can't save a JPEG image using the LAB color space - so now you know. Switch back to RGB when you're done and you can save it.

Metro - Paris

This was one of my favourite shots of the Paris metro stations. It was a throw away shot - I just took it walking past because I loved the bikes around it and there weren't many people around.

I dumped most of the color in the photo as it just looked so good when you look at the blacks and whites in it.

I duplicated the background layer and turned the top layer into a black and white using the new Photoshop Black and White adjustment layer which lets you select which direction to take each colour into. It's way more sophisticated than anything we've had in the past. Then I adjusted the opacity of the layer a little to show some of the colors from the layer underneath. The result is an almost ethereal photo. I've put it on a white tee shirt at CafePress in my store if you like it and want to wear it.

Graffiti de Paris

I was looking for an image to put on a t-shirt for a friend for Christmas. Let's say, he's a bit out there and pretty just won't cut it.

I had two good photos of this graffiti covered wall so the Photoshop Automate > Photomerge tool put them together into a panorama. I used the clone and copy and paste to put back the missing bits as it was shot from a moving boat - a far cry from the ideal for shooting a panorama.

Color fix was an issue. I needed a channel to blend back into the image to boost the color and contrast. Problem was, the red killed the blue and the blue killed the red. Solution was to use both.

Duplicate the background layer twice. Select the first copy, choose Image > Apply Image and apply the red channel to the image. Then use the second copy and apply the blue channel to the image. Use the lighten blend mode on the top layer to blend the two together. You can use a Layer mask on the top layer if necessary to bring back detail from the layer underneath.

The grunge details are an image/edge from a set of grunge images from Graphic Authority applied as a layer mask with a black background layer put behind everything.

Boats on the Seine

I went on a lot of boat rides in my 10 days in London and Paris. My dad was a sailor and a love of water flows in my blood alongside the bits and bytes. This photo is from one of the trips in Paris, the horror ride in the boat on the Seine (see below for more details).

This image nearly defeated me. It is a big crop - what is left is under a quarter of the original image. It wasn't particularly in focus and the color was awful - for this read dirty grey - the boats had the sun hitting their sides so the color is washed out.

I did some fancy work with Curves to get the color out of the image. I over adjusted the colours very harshly and then blended a couple of versions of the image back into itself. The result is pretty good and I think the image has some charm and that's why it's here.

It really was a beautiful afternoon in Paris.

Early morning Paris style

I've just returned from 10 days in Paris, London and the surprisingly wonderful Brighton.

I plan to display some of my photos as I fixed and work with them. Today, it's two gentlemen at the cafe I stopped at for a Cafe Creme every morning in Montparnasse. This is the essence of what Paris means to me. Lazy mornings sipping great coffee. I will never again make the mistake of imagining for one minute that Starbucks has anything at all to do with good coffee!

The photo is pretty much unedited. It has been converted to black and white, straightened and cropped but that's about it.