Week 41: Paris at night, or “see the craters of the moon”

This week, Paris at night. There is no doubt that all cities are special at night. Paris, even more so. I have a friend (whom I’ve already mentioned here) who wanted to take a walk around town and take some pictures, and so I joined him. We spent an hour in around St. Michel and the Ile Saint-Louis. My friend is an excellent photographer, and I felt very encouraged, I burned through a roll and half of film in about an hour. I think took quite a few photographs that perhaps I wouldn’t have otherwise taken.

The Champo, a temple of cinema (quartier Latin)

Next, rue de la Harpe, that temple of culinary delights, and the “Theatre de la Huchette”, where they have been showing the same Ionesco play (“The bald soprano”) for almost fifty years:

There are still some bookshops around here:

The abbey bookshop

Notre dame de Paris, and the moon:

Crossing the pont Saint-Louis, we met this fellow who had a nice line in astronomical observations! But alas it was cloudy, as you can see from my other photographs…

See the craters of the moon

And now onto the Ile Saint-Louis, where there is the famous “Brasserie Ile Saint-Louis”:

Ile St. Louis

Now here are some streets of Paris, including Rue du Bièvre (on the right). Francois Mitterrand used to live here, and it is one of important streets in Jacques Yonnet’s wonderful  Rue des maléfices, one of my favourite books of all time about Paris. Here in this book we learn that house at 1bis was cursed, and that’s why there is a garden there today, as it was dismantled… There is a couscous restaurant further down the street (so my friend told me) that Mitterrand  always used to eat at, and one day because of an official function, the street was closed and the regulars could not eat there. Mitterrand sent them a big load of flowers afterwards to make up for it…

And the moon over the Rive Droite. I was only able to take this one by wedging my camera against some railings.

The moon on film !

We met these nice folks on other side of the bridge

Last photograph: a ‘test shot’ taken in the 14ème a few days before:

Avenue Reille (test from roll 100)

That’s it for this week. Next week: a return to Ireland.

Here are my previous posts on 52rolls.

And…Here is my new website.

(I was amazed to discover that the domain made from my name was still available…)

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Technical notes. Camera: Leica M6 with a Summicron-M f2.0/50mm. Film: Tri-X 400 @ 3200 in HC110 B at … 25 mins! In the end I don’t think there was much point trying this ‘extreme’ push – my photographs don’t look so much different from the normal 1600 push. I even tried developing half a roll with ‘stand development’ and that didn’t do much either (I couldn’t really tell the differences between two halves of the roll). Conclusions: best things to do are open the lens up fully, buy faster lenses, expose for the shadows, and learn how to shoot at 1/8s (probably by holding your breath)!