For you with little or no experience with Paris in the winter time, understand how far north it is compared to, say, New York City. It gets dark real early in December and January. Also, it’s gray and rainy a lot. I use to spend a lot of time in Paris back in the day. Some of the images that I made there still stand the test of time for me. Back them, my only color options were 35mm negatives or transparencies. Although I was making medium format black & white negatives, I never used 2 1/4 color film. It didn’t have a darkroom where I could make C prints, and for me at the time, having color labs make color prints for me was beyond my financial reach. In the past several years, I’ve gone through all my 35mm transparencies, and I’ve scanned a bunch of them. It’s also a little strange because as I’ve mentioned in other posts, the square frame of 2 1/4 has always been my first choice, followed by 4×5 or 8×10 rectangles. Having started to use a fx Nikon DSLR, I’m back to the 35mm rectangle.
This was the skyline from my bedroom in Paris during one winter that I spent there. I remember, I made a lot of skyline images, but I’ve always really like this one, probably because of the way the curtains filter the image. And there something about seeing the weak, insipid winter sunlight in this image that jolts memories of that time, and how I started to make better photographs.
