Images shot on Ilford HP5 Plus 400 in the Lomo LC-A
Paris. The City of Light. Ville lumière.
It’s not the only place in the world with that nickname. There are loads of them. Baghdad, Lucerne, Perth, Venice, to name but a few.
Wolverhampton.
The list goes on.
And so does this blog post, taking us on a tour – le tour – around a few landmarks of the French capital shot as I walked around with some Ilford HP5 Plus film loaded in le fantastique Lomo LC-A.
We start at another kind of tour.
La Tour Eiffel.
Contents
The best places to photograph the Eiffel Tower?
Obviously that subheading has a question mark at the end of it because I’m not saying these are the best places to photograph the Eiffel Tower from. I wouldn’t claim to know that for sure.
But they are pretty good ones, albeit pretty cliché as well. A French word, that.
That image just up there, the one with the slight film burn along its left-hand side, was taken on Rue de l’Universite.
It’s a fine spot for getting close to the tower, having some nice old buildings on either side of your shot, and mingling with everyone else there taking highly similar snaps for the ‘Gram.
I’m not judging. I’ve done the same.
If you want to come at it from another angle, head up to the famous Place du Trocadéro – an iconic square that gives you a more elevated view of the tower.
This may just be the most popular place to photograph it from, so you’re again not going to be shooting anything that hasn’t been shot before.
But trust me when I say, you’re not going to be the worst person that ever went up there for a photo opportunity either.
This guy has that title sewn right up.
Of course, anywhere you go that has the tower in the shot, be it nearby or further in the background somewhere, is going to be a decent place to get a decent photograph from.
Back down at street level you can find other things to include in your images too. Things that other, more miserable people might complain about.
Things that you can use if you change your buts to ands.
“I want to take a clear picture of the tower but there’s a line of tourists in the middle of the road posing for photographs.”
No.
“I want to take a picture of the tower and there’s a line of tourists in the middle of the road posing for photographs so I’m including them too.”
“I’m in Paris but it’s raining so my photographs aren’t going to be very good.”
No.
“I’m in Paris and it’s raining so I’m using that puddle in my photograph.”
You get the idea.
A few personal words on the Eiffel Tower, before we move on. The first time I went to Paris, which was some years ago now, there was something about getting up close to it that made me realise – it’s actually kind of hulking and stark and industrial.
It is beautiful and an iconic and world-famous landmark of course, and is the symbol of one of the planet’s greatest cities. I like it and I’m glad it exists.
I’m just saying that for something with such a seminal shape and cultural significance, it was a little sobering when I got there and it was like a brown-grey mass of cold iron.
That the impression and idea of it from afar – whatever afar means for you here – is really quite different to how I felt when I was close enough to understand it in person.
On to the Arc de Triomphe and Champs-Élysées
The reason I wanted to give those thoughts on the Eiffel Tower was so I could compare them to another great Paris landmark here and say that I kind of had the complete opposite experience with this one.
From Trocadéro, I took the short walk up Avenue Kléber – the thoroughfare that takes you to the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile.
The Arc has that instantly recognisable shape too and is really as much a symbol of this city as the Eiffel Tower is for me, but I never appreciated – again, from afar – quite how striking and ornate it actually was.
I’m really no art expert but just in the photograph below you can see the detailed work that went into this thing, and those carved statues on the side are nothing short of magnificent either.
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier that lies beneath the Arc de Triomphe with its eternal flame is something else I hadn’t known was there before I first went, and has a history that I think is worth reading up on if you’re at all interested in such things.
And one final thing here before we move on – I never went up the Eiffel Tower but I’ve heard it isn’t the greatest experience. But I have been up onto the roof of the Arc de Triomphe and can tell you it’s worth the time to do so.
Moving on from the Arc de Triomphe, I made my way down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées – perhaps the most famous road in Paris and one of the best-known and most expensive shopping streets in the world.
Not that you’d have to spend much to get a new memory card or a miniature Eiffel Tower in the Souvenirs of Paris emporium, I guess, but things do get a little more lavish as you head on further.
The Arcades des Champs-Élysées and Galeries Lafayette Champs-Élysées are both there if you want to spend some Euros or just have a wander inside to look at the 19th-century architecture,
I mention these two because they’re what I came away with pictures of. I’m sure there are more.
A few from the Louvre
After walking the length of the Champs-Élysées, I passed through Place de la Concorde and some of the Tuileries Garden without taking any photographs in or of them.
They were nice, but I had to save my exposures for other places. Places like the Musée du Louvre, which is where we come to now.
Like the upper reaches of the Eiffel Tower, this is another place in Paris I’ve been to a few times without ever paying to go up or into.
I know, the Mona Lisa is in there. And lots of other things too. I’ve just never really been interested in art galleries. I’d rather spend my time making my own photographs of the place, like I did here.
At least then there’s some symmetry there, and I don’t just mean in the first image below. I mean in that if I don’t really care about seeing what da Vinci did, the least I can do is produce something that nobody else cares about either. 🙂
Some from the Seine and Notre-Dame
Along the way from the Place de la Concorde and down to the Louvre and beyond, I got some shots from the side of the river as my stroll through Paris continued.
Because as Parisian icons go, the Seine is right up there.
The first of these was the Léopold-Sédar-Senghor bridge, which was opened in 1999.
Linking the Tuileries Garden on one side of the water to the Musée d’Orsay on the other, it’s an impressive structure with its two tiers and crossing the Seine in a single span as it does.
That Musée d’Orsay is in the background of the second shot, with a pretty long ferry passing in front of it.
My final Paris landmark in the city centre was the cathedral at Notre Dame. It sits on an island in the Seine – called Île de la Cité, or City Island – with that final image up there being taken from the Pont au Double bridge that links it to the mainland.
If mainland is even the right word here. Seems weird to use it but I’ve got nothing better.
Notre Dame was of course unfortunately extensively damaged by that fire in 2019. As you can see, it was still being restored when I was there but is slated to reopen in December 2024.
I’m looking forward to that happening. I feel like scaffolding and cranes don’t really suit it.
Ending this Paris tour at Sacré Coeur
There was one more place I wanted to visit on this day of shooting some Ilford HP5 Plus 400 in the Lomo LC-A in Paris, but this one wasn’t within walking distance.
The Sacré-Cœur Basilica sits on top of the hill at Montmartre – not too far out of the centre but still a subway ride away, and certainly worth a visit in my opinion.
Up there you get the beautiful white-domed church, as well as decent views back down over the city itself. There were even some enterprising individuals selling ice-cold bottles of Heineken to anyone in need of some refreshment after climbing the steps to get there.
I didn’t partake, but I respect the initiative.
With Sacré-Cœur seen, the sun threatening to begin setting and my roll of film almost finished, it was time to head back to the hotel. I just didn’t know at this point the dread I would feel when I got back there.
Why I thought this had all been for nothing
There were a couple more shots from Sacré-Cœur that I’m unable to show you by themselves.
There’s a shot of the classic Paris Métropolitain subway entrance signs that I took when using up the roll on the way back to the hotel that I can’t show you in isolation either.
Let me explain, and tell you why I thought I might have ended this day with no photographs at all to show for my hours of walking around shooting.
I remember finishing my roll, yet also it not finishing too. I’d shot more than 36 exposures. Yes, you often get one or two more from a roll. But not this many. I shot and wound it on again. And again. And again and again. It was never-ending.
I didn’t know what was happening. I’d been sure earlier the film was loaded properly because I’d checked the rewind mechanism was rotating when I’d been winding it on. I always check that.
But now I wasn’t sure. I got back to my hotel room and knew I had to find out for sure. When I rewound the film, it would be obvious if it had never been loaded because there would be no tension in it. Or maybe it had snapped?
But rewinding it felt normal, and it was safely back in the canister when I opened up the camera. I was glad about this, but also confused. Until I got the roll developed and saw what had happened.
For some reason, it had stopped winding on near the end and the last bunch of shots had all become one multi-exposure shot.
At the time of writing, I can’t remember if I’ve used the LC-A since. I don’t recall definitely doing so, so I’ll have to see how it behaves next time I do.
For now though, I was just relieved I got my shots from that day in Paris.
Shooting black and white in the City of Light. In the end, it turned out alright. 🙂
If you liked that walk around Paris and want more adventures illustrated with film photography, why not have a look at some of these:
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