What I See, Part 3 - A Short Walk Through Paris

While I was in Paris for the Paris Auto Show, I spent some time on the street. After all, Paris is the home of street photography and it would be a major photographic sin not to go out and shoot. In fact, The Voices and I got a few chills just thinking about the fact that we were shooting on the same streets that Eugene Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson worked.

I went for a walk with some friends in the core of the city. The route we took was only 3 km, which normally only takes about 30 minutes to walk. Even for a 30 minute walk, I will take a camera with me. Just in case The Voices get rowdy.




My friends are not photographers and spent most of the walk chatting away with each other, leaving me to shoot in peace. In the style of Henri Cartier-Bresson, I had my little Fuji X10 camera ready to go, should I see something worth capturing.

So what did I see on this short stroll through the City of Light? I will start on Avenue du Maréchal Gallieni...


Standing, sitting, or laying down, the position didn't seem to matter. Almost everywhere I looked I saw the cliché Parisian sight of couples making out.




A few metres away, and in a whole other mind-space, I saw some guys flying their Ultimate in front of the Air France museum.




Just down the way from the Ultimate players, I saw a very sensible fellow who decided to pull over before texting.




While I was shooting the cyclist, I got an itchy feeling in my back. I looked around and I saw a model staring intently at me from Pont Alexandre III.




Why he was looking at me, I have no idea. Maybe he knew The Voices.

I walked across the bridge and over to Port de la Concorde. On the wall and on the bridge I saw a series of floating heads.







Walking under Pont de la Concorde, I saw how wonderfully the light reflected off the water and on to the stone of the bridgework.




On to Quai des Tuileries, where others on the Quai didn't see what I saw. What I saw was how the sun was like a beacon hanging over La Tour Eiffel.




By this point, I had fallen well behind the group I was with. They were not photographers, so they were not stopping all the time to shoot. I hurried along, catching them at Jardin des Tuileries. There, I saw a young boy being instructed in the ancient Parisian tradition of public tree watering.




From there it was back to La Seine and Le Pont Solférino (now called Passerelle Léopold-Sédar-Senghor), where I saw yet another set of lovers. I have to say, it was a pretty cool spot they had.




The Passerelle Léopold-Sédar-Senghor, besides being a mouthful to say, is a really cool bridge. The Voices love the sweeping lines. There is a ramp from both the quay and the roadway, which you can see in the above photograph. I came back the next morning with my Nikon because I saw a wonderful line abstraction that would make a great background for one of my dance pictures.




But I get ahead of myself, so back to my walk. I went up the ramp and all along the top of the bridge I saw love locks.




I'm still undecided if these love locks add or detract from the bridge's beauty.

I was now lagging very far behind my group and I tried to quickly cross the bridge, but on the other side where the two ramps come together, I saw two young girls out smoking, texting, drinking, and talking.




Bridges allow me to view things from a different perspective. Having the high ground gave me an unusual angle to watch these skateboarders. I saw one break off from the rest to practise his Ollies.



Maybe the girls on the bridge were waiting for these guys; maybe they would wander down and try their hand, but I couldn't stay to see what would transpire. I hurried to catch up and by then we were back at the apartment. I had time for one more shot and when I saw the angle of the setting sun cast long shadows on the street below, I knew I had my closing photograph.





Other posts about France are here. Use the "Older Posts" and "Newer Posts" buttons and the bottom to scroll through the list.

My photographs are for sale as fine art prints and fine art greeting cards on my web gallery.


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What I See, Part 2 - Snap!

The 17th century Cardinal de Retz, Jean François Paul de Gondi, stated: “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.”

Centuries later, Henri-Cartier Bresson applied this concept to photography: "Photography is not like painting. There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.

That is the moment the photographer is creative.

Oop! The Moment!

Once you miss it, it is gone forever."


One day I was sheltering from the rain under the canopy of a bandstand, I put on my big lens and looked around for a decisive moment. I waited. Looked. Waited. Looked. Waited.

After about an hour, a dog came by...

Snap!

(But all I got was.....poop.*)




Anticipation is key, because without it you can miss the moment. To anticipate, you have to draw upon your experience. When I saw a man walking along with his young kids, like I used to do, I had a feeling...

As a Dad, I know that there is a certain moment when the lights go on in your brain as you smell something and you realize...

Snap!




Near the palace there is a wonderful view down Karl Johans Gate. It is also where many people (and their kids) pose for photographs. I thought the street would make for a good backdrop, if only something interesting would happen. So I waited until I saw these kids, posing stiffly. I got ready.

Suddenly, one of them remembered something she just had to tell the others...

Snap!




Near Majorstuen I saw a sign that said a Wayne's Coffee would soon be opening there. I love their hot chocolate. Since it is always handy to know where the closest place for a mug-up is, I went over to see when they would be open.

There was nothing interesting inside - renovations hadn't started yet. However I noticed that light was just right for the glass in the door to act as a mirror. The Voices thought that it would make an excellent frame in a composition, so I took a step back and waited. And waited. And waited. And waited.

Suddenly, I saw a girl on a bike coming down the street. Sure enough she rounded the corner, looked over her shoulder, and...

Snap!





Part 1 in this series is here.

Other posts about Norway are here. Use the "Older Posts" and "Newer Posts" buttons and the bottom to scroll through the list.


My photographs are available for purchase as fine art prints and fine art greeting cards from my web gallery.

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* You have to look very closely at this photograph in order to see that the decisive moment was indeed captured at the moment of...


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What I See. Part 1 - The Streets of Oslo.

I didn't set out to do street photography. I just wanted to shoot, but I was in the middle of a city. No landscapes to be hand, just streetscapes.

I had flown to Amsterdam from Canada and I woke up in the middle of the night, bug-eyed with jet lag. Rather than watch TV for a couple of hours, in a language that seems to involve doing unnatural things with the back of your throat, I decided to go out and see what I could photograph. On the way out the door, camera and tripod in hand, I passed a very surprised hotel night manager.

Happy with the images I made that night, I continued to shoot the streets, even when I didn't travel. While out on the street I have seen many unusual sights, met many wonderful people, and heard many interesting stories. That I even managed to remember to take the occasional photograph along the way is a bonus.

Nowadays, most of my street shooting is done during "normal" hours. But no matter if it is night or day, the process is the same: I go with camera in hand and try to open my mind to my surroundings. If I am lucky, the world pours through my soul and The Voices pick out the interesting bits, which I then try to photograph in a way that lets you see what I see.

You would think that Palaces would be a great place to shoot, what with their attendant crowds of people and colourful guards. But it is hard to avoid the cliche shots at Palaces; The Voices can be annoyingly silent when I am there.

Sometimes, though, what I see is a curious guard who just has to have a look at something over there!




Other times, when there are no tourists around to pose for, what I see is a lonely guard with nothing to do but bide his time marching back and forth on his small, empty parade ground.




In the grand tradition of street photography, many of my images are shot in black in white. The tradition may come from the fact that the fathers of the style only had B&W film to work with, but I like it because of how it emphasizes geometries, textures, and relationships. Colour sometimes gets in the way of all of this.

So when I see something, I sometimes see things in black and white, such as these flowers growing out of a car*.




Sometimes I will see things in colour, such as when I am pondering the question "Why anyone would put orange flowers in a blue car?*"




I usually carry a camera around with me. My little Fuji X10 can do a wonderful job. It is small and unobtrusive. As long as it is already on (it is very slow to start up), then I can grab images that I couldn't with a larger camera, which often calls attention to me and can therefore kill an opportunity before it unfolds. A case in point is when I was waiting in a crowded lobby to get in to see a Baroque concert and I saw an oblivious man and a flirty woman.




Of course with a smaller camera you can make your own luck, just by having it with you when fortune deals you special moment. One such time was when I was lucky enough to see one of nature's wonders: a double rainbow.




If you have ever walked with me while I have a camera in my hand (and even when I don't), you will know that I am often fully absorbed in my surroundings. I try to be fully aware of my environment, because I never know where I will see my next image. Sometimes I hear The Voices say, "In the words of The Friendly Giant, Look up. Look waaaaay up!"

And sometimes when I look up, I see a bicycle hanging from a lamp post.




While out walking, I saw a single house with sixteen numbers on a fence, almost hidden by bushes, trying to tell me where the other 15 houses were hidden.




While watching the May 17th parade wrap up, I saw a guy selling balloons who looked quite worried that he was not going to be able to unload all of his stock.




One day I noticed that there were heavy storm clouds rolling in. I love shooting in the rain, so I headed downtown to see what I could see.

I tried to stay dry by walking down a tree-lined street. A street hawker selling tourist brochures was also taking shelter under the same trees. What I saw was how well she had matched her shoe colour to the flowers where she was working.




Further along, I saw an overly protective dog owner who thought nothing of wrapping a poor dog up in a rain coat, even though it was quite warm out**. But then, I also saw she was the type of person who doesn't understand the futility of tucking her rain pants into her rain boots. What? You have wet feet? Duh!




Speaking of futility, that's also what I thought when I saw this guy watering plants in the rain! Or maybe it was another word I thought of!




At the end of the street, I saw how nicely this newsstand was tucked under the trees, giving a natural protection from the weather to both the newspapers and the customers.




By then the rain was coming down so hard I had to take refuge in a bandstand. I was joined by a little bird. Together we watched the rain come pouring down.




Part 2 of this series is here.

Other posts about Norway are here. Use the "Older Posts" and "Newer Posts" buttons and the bottom to scroll through the list.


My photographs are for sale as fine art prints and fine art greeting cards on my web gallery.

_____
* This car is a Simca 1000, I believe.
** Dogs don't sweat, they have to pant to keep cool. This little guy might actually have benefited from the rain.



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Friends In High Places

As much as I enjoyed the impressive expanse of The Prairies, I was very much looking forward to being in the mountains again.

When I moved to Calgary with my kids, we spent a lot of time camping in the mountains. My daughter particularly loved being in the mountains, whom she referred to as her "friends". I thought by immersing myself in the extraordinary colours of the mountains, I could wean The Voices of their fixation with prairie skies and hopefully get some Postcards for her.

If you need to feel the mountains envelop you, but you can't go for a hike (I didn't have enough time), then the only solution is to drive the Icefields Parkway. This highway, part of a World Heritage site, runs from Lake Louise to Jasper. It is a drive like no other in the world. The best bit is north of Lake Louise, heading towards the Columbia Icefields. With restrooms and a cafe, the visitor centre at the Athabasca Glacier makes for a good turn-around point.

There are a couple of good spots along the road where you can get a good perspective of just how massive the Canadian Rockies are. I stopped at one, only to find it overrun with tourists from a charter bus.




Elbowing the newbies out of the way, I took out my camera and woke up The Voices; after the exhausting work on The Prairies, they had napped during the drive up from Calgary. Slackers.

I wanted to show the size of the mountains and they suggested including the highway in the composition. If you look closely, you can see cars and trucks on the road. Tiny. To the right of the highway is the headwater of the North Saskatchewan River; the meltwater of the nearby Saskatchewan Glacier gives it life and its name.




Mount Saskatchewan is on the right, its impressive bulk hiding the Saskatchewan Glacier from our view. If you go back to the shot with the charter bus, you can see it hanging in the "V" notch gap in the mountain that is viewed near the back of the bus.




The Canadian Rockies are part of the same mountain chain as the American Rockies, but they do not look the same at all. While the American Rockies are a bit higher, their height comes from their high base and not from their vertical gain; the Canadian Rockies are taller base-to-top. They are also more rugged, largely due to heavier glaciation.







The entire ecosystem is different, too. It is colder and much wetter in the Canadian Rockies. The extra moisture makes for more lakes and rivers, some of which are very interesting. Take this river, for example. Even as I write this, I can still hear the roar and feel the power of all that water rushing past.




Despite the massive volume of water flowing in this river, it seems to totally disappear just a bit further downstream.




And it does, in a fashion: it has carved a slot canyon into the rock and the only way to see the river is to look down at it from directly above.




When you look at the entrance to the slot canyon, you can see how deep it is. The deepness of the canyon is what allows all that fast-moving water to disappear so quickly.




Not all mountain water is rough. Much of it sits in tranquil lakes like this one.



Here you can see the effect of a polarizer filter. When you turn 90 degrees to the sun, the saturation of the colours becomes intense when using one. In this case, I used a Singh Ray Gold N Blue polarizer for a touch more emphasis.




The green hue of mountain water comes from rock flour. The water is bitterly cold and not much usually grows in it. When you look into a mountain lake you can usually see the bare rocks at the bottom. If you take a close look at the bottom of the above photographs,you will see what I mean.

I did noticed that these plants were making some headway and were starting to encroach on the lake.




On my return back down the Parkway, I decided to stop at Lake Louise. There is a little sports store there that brings in very high-end gear for the tourists. Sometimes they overstock and I can score some deals at the end of the season. This time I came up dry.

Empty-handed, I was on the way out the door when I noticed a flyer for the Lake Louise Gondola ride. I had never been up the gondola in the summer, so I decided to check out.

Trying to eke out as much use of their ski lifts as possible, the Lake Louise Ski Resort operates one gondola during the summer to take hikers up Whitehorn Mountain. I had never been here in the summer and was surprised to find it looked very different from what it does in the winter.




While the view in the summer is different (the air has a lot more haze than in winter which gives the mountains a bluish hue), it is spectacular in its own right.




In this panorama photo, you can see the opposite side of the valley. Many a time I dropped the kids off at the alpine hill and headed over to Lake Louise to do some cross-country. We kept in touch by walkie-talkies and they would let me know when they were ready to pack it in for the day. I was always amazed at how clear the reception was, given how far I had to drive to get them. But as the crow flies, it's only about 1 km.

Lake Louise is on the right of the image above. It is barely visible as a small, blue area in a gap between two mountains. Using some rather heavy glass, I was able to zoom in on it.




I enjoyed shooting from this perspective. I was able to photograph the mountain tops by shooting across at them and not up at them.




I absorbed as much of the alpine greatness as I possibly could, but time was short and I had a flight out early the next day. So back down I went.

Park wardens had banned hiking down, as there was a bear in the area, so the lift was the only way down. Despite my acrophobia, I shunned the closed gondola and took the open chair. The open chair allows for much better photography because the windows in the gondola are often scratched too much to permit clear shooting. My only concern was about how I was going to shoot if I had my eyes closed.




I was in the process of testing both the compression and torsion strength of the safety bar on my chair, when I noticed that there was a commotion in the chair ahead of me.




Reluctantly releasing my death grip on the safety bar, I picked up my camera with its big lens to see what it was about. Zooming in, I could see the people in the chair pointing to something.




Even the people in the chair ahead of them were going on about something in the woods.




Since preparedness is the key to making great photographs, I quickly set my camera to "auto-everything" and waited. Then, through the trees, I saw a grizzly bear!

I raised my camera and fired off a long burst at 8 frames per second in a special and highly technical method called spray and pray. Maybe I didn't pray loud enough, because my autofocus thought I wanted to shoot the trees, which were closer to me.




This is a great example of why I normally shoot "manual-everything": I don't like leaving decisions to what some engineer in a lab 10 years ago thought would be a good picture in the field today.

Somewhat disappointed, I headed over to Lake Louise for a final magnificent-alpine-ambiance-soaking-up exercise. While there were no steamships heading off into the sunset, I was able to capture the cliche red canoe for my closing photograph.




I hope that these Postcards bring to my daughter lots of good memories of her friends in high places.



To see more of my blog posts from Western Canada and the U.S., click here. and use the "newer" and "older" links at the bottom to move through the posts.

To see my fine art prints that are for sale on my web gallery, click here.

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