An American in Paris - your feedback much appreciated

[JeffR]

These are shots I'm intending to post on my website, hence the © info. They were taken in '74. I've been doing variations in Photoshop for a while, trying for an antique feel on some (as if the shots aren't genuinely antique enough). Some I left as is. Any suggestions or critiques? Is the shot from the Eiffel Tower too 'touristy' or done-to-death?

I have some from Switzerland and Liechtenstein, but I'll save those for another time.

Thanks in advance for any feedback, positive or otherwise.

Oh, and F.Gordon, if you're out there, thanks for your tip a while back about Simpleviewer. I've configured 5 galleries; now I just need to get them functioning from within existing HTML pages. A glance at the Simpleviewer forum tells me I'm not along in incurring some frustration with this process. And I actually do a little commercial web design... :eyes:

Eiffel Tower at Sunset


View from the Eiffel Tower


Arc de Triomphe


Place de la Concorde


Champs Elysées


Barge on the Seine

[Blue_In_AK]

1. Very nice

They look like pictures from an old Life magazine. The "antiqueness" works well.

[JeffR]

2. Thanks, Blue. Being in Paris felt like being in a magazine

Especially after downing a few shots of anisette at a sidewalk café...

[TahitiNut]

4. Ricard or Pernod?

Tourists drink Pernod. Parisians drink Ricard. :rofl:

Ahhh.... sitting in the sun on Place de la Opera with some Ricard over ice and a small pitcher of water. Sipping and watching the people walk by. Heaven.

[TahitiNut]

3. "Barge"? Or Bateau Mouche?

What ever gave you the idea of taking pictures of Paris? I've never heard of such a thing. Nobody ever takes photos in Paris - I don't think they've even seen a camera there. The Eiffel Tower? What's that? The Arc d'Triomphe? The Champs Elysées? Place de Concorde? What UNUSUAL choices for photographs! How strange!

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:



Where's Sacre Cour? Moulin Rouge? Les Invalides? Pont Neuf? Notre Dame? Isle d'Cite? Isle de St. Louis? The Louvre? The Bois de Bologne?

Seriously, though, your photos compare favorably with the iconic photos of Paris. I'm not personally attuned to that particular interpretation of the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, but that's just personal taste. I have feelings about the PdlC based on the fact it's the only time I had a small fender-bender. (A Parisian cut too close to my rear bumper and scraped his own car. No damage to mine.) I commuted through it and along the Champs Elysees several times a week. Negotiating the round-abouts at PdlC and AdT (L'Etoile) was a road warrior's dream.

I love Paris. I think it's something that becomes a permanent infection - part of one's DNA. I worked just outside Paris in Aulnay sous Bois for 3.5 months almost 30 years ago and it was incredible. Whenever I've visited since, it's very much like coming 'home' again. (It's also some of what I enjoy about Tahiti - the French influence. Even though that's a mixed bag)

I'm not sure, but I think the 'barge' is a bateau mouche ... a dinner barge. Covered in glass like a greenhouse or sun porch, lit, and carrying perhaps 50-80 dinner guests. ("Bateau mouche" literally translates to "fly boat" ... what we might call a "water bug.")

[JeffR]

5. Not coincidentally, I almost got run over just after the obelisk shot

Yeah, these are pretty much prêt-à-porter, sadly.

I sifted out a batch of shots that included the Bois de Bologne, Notre Dame, Pigalle and so on. These struck me as the best of what I had on hand. What's really maddening is I have a batch of slides - somewhere! - shot off the beaten tourist track in sidestreets & little churches. If I could lay my hands on them it might balance out the clichéd subjects. Of course there probably isn't a square inch of the city that hasn't been photographed a million times.

You're likely right about the bateau. My memory of the evening is clouded by drink (Ricard!); once I set down the monopod I had to avail myself of the railing too.

[TahitiNut]

6. The 'feel' of Paris is very hard to convey photographically, imho.

Not only does one encounter the veritable ocean of images that we've all been inundated with for all our lives, there's an ephemeral confluence of pedestrian perspectives that are formative of the experiences we visitors have had.

For example, we immediately confront the centuries-old architecture and infrastructure and are impressed by the age and historical import of what we see. But it's not merely the age - which we can see in a museum - it's the continuity. It's not "preservation," it's perpetual rejuvenation. The "old" is continually made "young" and the "new" is given an aura of 'unproven' and 'impermanent.' Thus, there's nothing feeble about the 'old' in Paris - it's vibrant and real in an everyday sense. This is something we (Americans) just don't confront. It's not just slapping a neon sign on an old building, either, like pancake make-up on an 80-year-old saloon singer. It's the daily tread of human feet in the pursuit of mundane tasks that wear upon the steps and stones of the city, adding to the patina of years-upon-years of events both of great moment and private reflection. It's a sense of the dynamic and living and maturing habitat ... a living organism.

Another example is the confluence of the pedestrian and the automotive. Paris really is a shoe leather city. But the traffic is inseparable from any experience of the city, too. It's like we not only have our blood stream (foot traffic) we also have our lymphatic system (auto traffic) and the two are really one. The constant circulation of human activity throughout the organism that's Paris is manifest in the three modes of individual movement: auto, foot, and Le Metro. Taken individually, they're interesting... but when experienced as a Gestalt, they convey the living organism of an alive city.

This is VERY difficult to portray. Yet it's the very essence of Paris. Living people in a vibrant habitat in a continuum of centuries. It's an amazing town - of the mud people.


If I were to try to create an image, I might try to compose a shot of some newer buildings (La Defense?) and some older buildings (Avenue Grand Armee?). I might then increase the color saturation of the older architecture and mask the newer buildings with the tin-type monchromatic effect ... exactly the opposite of the trite. In that way, I'd be trying to suggest the continuing rejuvenation of daily life in a living city -- that time has not aged it, but matured it. Time has been about growth and increased invigoration and the 'new' has not yet blossomed through that continued nurturance. That's just one notion.

[JeffR]

7. Very true & well said

It's more organic and vibrant than any city I've seen, with the possible exception of New York. And, as you point out, very much a walking city where traffic is an omnipresent reality.

Ah to go back with a digital camera & just take thousands of pics the way I do right in the neighborhood...:cry:

[regnaD kciN]

10. I know what you mean...

Ah to go back with a digital camera & just take thousands of pics the way I do right in the neighborhood...

I spent part of my childhood in Europe. Lived in Geneva, visited Paris, London, Rome, Venice, Athens, Copenhagen, Madrid, and far too many other places to list. I went back there a couple of times, but the last visit was in 1972. Back then, I didn't even take snapshots -- I didn't start using the family Instamatic until a few months after my last trip. :shrug:

I was talking with my mother a few weeks ago, and mentioned about how much I wish I could go back there. She, who did so on a few occasions during the '80s and '90s, said that it wasn't the same anymore. Everything had become "Americanized," with skyscrapers, fast-food outlets, gridlock, and other facets of U.S. "popular culture" gradually becoming dominant. It appears that my time there was just about the ideal period, the interval between the postwar hardship of the '40s and '50s and the McEurope of today. Too bad I wasn't using a camera back then...

[F.Gordon]

8. Love this series

Definitely a unique artistic take on place that has had a brazillion pics taken of it. The silhouette of the tower is very nice and I love the haunting feel of "Concorde".

I don't know that I'll ever see Paris/France but if I happen to find myself there with camera I think I'd go for the people/street snaps. See if I can get lost in the maze of Paris which for me shouldn't be too difficult.
:dunce:

My mother had wanted to go to Paris/France since she was a teenager. Several years ago she finally had the opportunity with the help of a friend. She actually took some interesting pics... my faves of which were the peep-street snaps. And she was using disposable-one shot cameras. :P One of her pics....of which I tweaked just a tad. ;-)



As for the (free) Simpleviewer thing? Assuming you're using the free version. You'll need to hack/write a new script to embed this into an existing html. Or you could use 'frames' to launch the simpleviewer page. This could be a bit time consuming. The alternative would be to buy the (not free) simpleviewer which comes with the script already written to embed it into a html page. $50 is certainly a lot cheaper than the $hundreds that the fancy software programs cost.

I've been using it to send/email galleries that I put together for specific people to view specific crap that I've done and I use it at a personal site but I do so by opening the simpleviewer page in a new window. Keeps it simple that way and peeps don't navigate away from my site.

Again, love these photos.
:hi:

[JeffR]

9. Thanks, F.Gordon

That's a helluva nice shot from a disposable camera. It just screams an invitation to walk down the street and explore.

I added a script to get the slideshows working inline on existing pages, but they continue to open new pages instead when the Gallery link is clicked. Far as I can tell, I have some kind of issue with directory structure. In any case, the site is still so "under construction" that this issue is 9th or 10th on the to-do list. The frames idea has potential, especially as I'm going to have graphics, web design screenshots, writing and MP3 links to incorporate. If I only had a brain, or a little hash...:smoke: Quite possibly I'll end up going for the open-in-new-window option after all.

Thanks for your feedback!:)