Bibliothèque nationale de France

Bibliothèque nationale de France, shot on Ilford HP5+.

Amazing wooden decking and some very sharp towers. The architecture is fascinating as it somehow gives the impression of an immense open space, while hiding large sections of the library under your feet. As an aside, maintaining all the wood here in Paris’ notoriously damp climate must be challenging. Shot with the M7 and 50mm on Ilford HP5+ 35mm film and processed in HC110 1+63 (“H”) for 8:30 at 24c. The Zeiss C-Sonnar is a great general purpose lens, but it has a bit too much distortion for these kind of straight-line […]

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Bridge

  The Passerelle Simone-de-Beauvoir, Paris. The same bridge as the lead photo in the previous post, but taken facing in the opposite direction, and using a film camera rather than a phone. Not withstanding compositional differences, whether or not the film images are better or worse than their phone equivalents is really a matter of taste – all that you can really say is that they are different. I started shooting film last year to help make the photographic process more deliberate and considered, and to a certain extent I […]

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Heaven Sent

Look up- flare bound building.

Building with Flare, Paris. And a time traveling title from the future. The image quality from the phone camera is not all bad. Here, the limited dynamic range and the tendency of the lens to flare badly (at least compared to any other camera I have) are exploited to vainly try to add some interest to an otherwise humdrum architectural image. Unlike with film, WYSIWYG making it easier to work around the (massive) limitations of the phone camera’s sensor – which has very limited dynamic range.

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State of Decay

Market Stall, Paris

The sofa of reasonable comfort at the Marché aux puces de la Porte de Vanves, Paris. An interesting flea market with a nice random collection of unusual and reasonably priced kick-knacks. We came away with some strangely warped records, some metal stamps and a bakelite camera (which if I can find some 620 spools may yet get to shoot again…).

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The Pyramids of Mars

I really really debated as to whether or not to include an explicit photograph of the tower in this series – but the chance to legitimately use the title was too good to pass up :-) It is very hard to figure out any way whatsoever to take an original photograph of the Eiffel Tower that has not been made a million times over – including this one. However, I was taken by the repetition of the basic shape of the tower from within its own structure – seen here looking up […]

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The Crusade

Candles under a bridge, with Notra Dame in the background.

Tourist snap of Notre Dame de Paris. I was disappointed that the buttresses on the cathedral didn’t actually fly. There are a few more pictures from inside the cathedral after the break – although not great, it was surprising how well the phone managed with the dark interior.

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The Sun Makers

Ad-hoc table and chairs with purple carpet under a bridge in Paris. This is something that I never thought that I would see in a major European city. I first encountered people living in make-shift tents and mini-houses under bridges in Kyoto. In Paris, it seemed that almost every bridge with space housed some temporary shelters, whether made from cardboard or actual tents:

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Love and Monsters

If not the city of death, then surely the city of love! And possibly some monsters too. Some more slightly NSFW and poorly captioned images on this theme after the break. I think that at this point I was giving up trying to make quality pictures and just shooting anything that didn’t move. I was actually hoping to get some street photographs of people kissing, but I think the slight rain meant that there were no opportunities in the short time that we had.

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City of Death

Cheating somewhat, all the following Instagram/phone images this week were shot in Paris. I suspect that Paris has some kind of photographic distortion field that makes it impossible to take uninteresting pictures, even with a phone. This is something that should be easy to test… For reasons that are unclear, all these posts are named after Dr Who serials. City of Death was shot (partly) in Paris, and like the production of these images also featured a lot of fairly aimless running around the streets. I have already given up trying to use WordPress on the phone […]

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Portals

Girl in Doorway, Bellagio, Italy. Leica M7 with Zeiss ZM 1.5/50 and Ilford Delta 100 film.

Reflections on a journey with doors and cobbled streets. Taken in Bellagio, Italy and somewhat out of sequence, due to vagaries of processing and scanning… Leica M7 with Zeiss C-Sonnar 50mm and Ilford Delta 100 black and white film processed in HC110.

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