My wife and I snuck in a kid-free 5 day trip to Paris staying in Montmartre but I didn’t want to stumble around gormlessly looking at the usual Parisian tourist spots. I was keen to capture authentic interactions between people and space that aren’t typically found on postcards.
Whilst over-tourism is a global problem, there’s some conflict between tourists and locals closer to home in many European countries. I tried to be sensitive and bring positive engagements with those we interacted with in boulangeries, restaurants and shops. As well as going off the beaten track, we made a concerted effort to speak as much GCSE French that we could muster and always addressed locals with a smile. This isn’t a solution to over-tourism obviously, but hopefully showing some politeness and authenticity can go a long way.
I wanted to carry my Leica Q2 but it wasn’t insured to take abroad so I had to fall back on my trusty Fuji X-T3. I wanted a look that would suit the urban grey tones but also wanted to step away from Classic Chrome that makes up most of the custom settings on that camera.
I’m no street photographer, but I am fascinated in documenting human behaviour. Paris has interesting, serendipitous moments by the bucket full. This meant I wanted to capture with authentic colours, like my Leica nails so well. The Leica look has these amazing rich darker tones and shadows that maintain loads of detail with this crisp micro-contrast that Leica glass is synonymous with.
A bargain 35mm 1.4 7Artisans lens was never going to compete with the 28mm Summilux on my Leica Q2 in terms on contrast, but it does do a good job of rendering colour.
I picked Velvia but dropped the colour saturation right down to -4 and set the DR at 400% whilst using ISO around ISO 1600. This helped prop the shadows up a bit and stop them burning out to black but I also nudged the highlights up to +1/+2.
