When you first arrive in a new city, you can’t wait to get out and explore. There are new sights to be seen, new experiences to be had. But if it’s somewhere you’ve visited many times before there isn’t that urgency. New sights can wait for tomorrow. Today, on arrival, your desire is rather to reconnect, to regain that sense of feeling at home. And for me, in Paris, that means a walk by the Seine.
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Of course if you want to see Paris from a high viewpoint you can do as many tourists do and go up the Eiffel Tower. Or you can stand on the steps in front of the Sacré Coeur on the hill of Montmartre. And once those obvious tourist boxes are ticked, there are still plenty of other options.
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Henri IV was a much-loved king of France, reigning from 1589 to 1610, when he was assassinated. Baptised a Catholic but raised a Protestant by his mother, he tried to balance the interests of both. Four years after his death a statue of him was placed on the Île de la Cité where it is crossed by the Pont Neuf, facing the Place Dauphine.
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By ‘looking over’ the places we visit with our cameras, that is properly looking at and seeing them, we are less likely to ‘overlook’ a great photo opportunity.
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Photography, like all arts, is a subjective business. We all have our favourites. At times though it seems it’s almost as hard to judge other people’s work as it is our own. Nevertheless, we often do just that.
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How good are you at self-criticism when it comes to photography? Are you ruthless about discarding less successful shots? And can you easily decide which of several is your best?
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All of us who love to travel, and are fortunate enough to be able to do so, will I hope be looking back on a year filled with both familiar and foreign places. For most of us, 2022 was the year in which we began to feel comfortable travelling again. When, despite a few new forms to fill in and masks to be worn, perhaps reluctantly, on planes, the world opened up again and we could scratch that travel itch, relieve that homesickness ‘for the places we have never known’.
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There is a theme emerging in these monthly round-ups, a theme of bookends! I’ve already pointed out that while July was bookended by happy gatherings of family and friends, August was similarly bookended with funerals. And now we come to September and we are back to happier bookends: city breaks.
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If you want to understand the people of a city a great place to start is in one of their parks. Seeing them relaxing, at play, you can appreciate not how different they are from you but how similar.
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I never tire of wandering the streets of Paris; there is always so much to see and to photograph. From elegant buildings to quirky details and of course plenty of street art.
