Rain in Paris.....All Day!...., Paris 3.1.5

It rained. All day!

We stayed inside. Went to the Petite Pont Café below for lunch. I had a wonderful beef stew. Diana had an omelette. It continued to rain, but the café was loaded with people. Since this was definitely not a day for shooting, we decided to simply take it easy. After all, we have been running pretty much full tilt for 3 weeks.

We both miss family and friends. My daughter Justice and son in law Brian have been holding the fort and tackling the monstrous job of taking care of business…TCB! We miss you guys. Maybe we will be in Ireland together soon rather than Alaska! Alaska? Brian, we love you, but have you been there? Yikes. Temperatures get cold enough to break axe heads.

Tomorrow we are taking the tour bus. Now if that sounds way too touristy, let me explain that the L’ Open Tour buses make a huge circuit around Paris. One buys a two day pass for 29.00 Euro per person and can get on and off as they please. Actually, pretty cool. It’s actually cheaper and more convenient than the Metro. A 5 day pass on the Metro is 59.00 Euro per person but you have to know where you going and that can be a hazard as one trip we took Friday landed us (as I mentioned) in a rather seedy area of Paris.

Cameras are ready for tomorrow, batteries charged, SDHC cards are formatted and all is ready to go.

As a sidebar, I was doing some very cursory counting over the last few days and was amazed at the number of DSLR’s hanging around necks. More Canons than Nikons…probably twice as many. (Most were pretty high end). There were plenty of mirrorless cameras such as Olympus and a few Sonys. Oddly, I did not see any Fujis. I did see a very few Leica M9 cameras, as well. (One guy with an M9 was staring at our Fujis trying to grasp what exactly we had. The Fujis do have a very retro film look).

There was a time when I would have loved to own an M2 or M3 but back in those days, it was still hugely priced around, if memory serves, $1500! Today, an M9 (which only shoots black and white) sells for somewhere in the high end neighborhood of $7900 for a body alone! A lens can set you back as much as another 7 grand. My opinion (and that is all it is since I am the guy who back 1972 predicted no one would ever produce an auto focus camera and in 1999 predicted digital would never replace film!).

All of that being said, our Fujifilm X-100’s do not have interchangeable lenses (sporting the equivalent of a 35mm lens on a 35mm camera) but has served us well. So well, in fact, I believe that the landscape work we will produce from these excellent little cameras, should astound even the uninitiated. One thing Fuji did right was change the digital pattern and removed the anti aliasing filter (AAF) from the sensor thus producing remarkable images of superb quality even at ISO ratings of 6400! For street shooting, it is also nice to have a choice of 3 frames per second or 5 fps. You don’t miss much if you have to shoot fast. (I used the 3fps shooting our Czech friends at the Eifel Tower the other day). My biggest complaint with the Fuji is it eats batteries like a madman coming off a 2 week fast.

I didn’t mean to turn this into a discussion of cameras but it’s raining and I didn’t have any new travel tips for you. Hence. Camera talk.

I will include some “off subject” photographs for you in this blog so all is not lost. When we return, we will be publishing a book of Ireland and France. We will also be printing several pieces (from 11x14 to 16x24) and framing these for exhibit and sale.

Many of our pieces are already available at Fine Art America as canvas, metal and postcards plus framed prints and these are very reasonably priced. We will be printing our brains out after we get home. If anyone is interested in our books, please let us know.