Paris Engagement Photo Shoot

I joined this fabulous pair in Paris, the city of love, for their engagement photo shoot. It also happened to be the wettest trip to Paris I’d ever made and one of the most challenging to shoot, but as so often happens when you’re thrown lemons – you make lemonade, right! We met in the morning in the station beneath the Grande Arche de la Défense and tucked in to McDonalds breakfast burgers and coffee, which was essential as it was blowing a gale above us. Venturing out from the relative warmth and huddled under umbrellas we climbed the steps of the Grand Arch in the driving rain. The architectural canopy provided me just enough cover to start taking photographs (who designed it with huge holes in for goodness sake!), but despite the rain it was quite bright and the wet ground was throwing me some beautiful reflections and contrast to play with.

A short ride later on the Paris Metro and we were heading towards the Eiffel Tower. The Metro is awesome and I jumped on the opportunity to photograph these two snuggling up in between stops – narrowly missing getting back on the train at one point, but catching one of my favourite images so far this year (it’s the black and white photograph of people getting on and off around them) – which is no mean feat as I’m super critical of my own work. On arrival at the Trocadero it was still raining, so we all went for a morale boosting lunch at Le Malakoff, a little brasserie, where I had to giggle at a little Chihuahua who was sitting at the table for his lunch with two women engrossed with their mobile phones. After lunch the ‘photo Gods’ had been kind to us and the rain had stopped. When it comes to photographing scenes featuring lots of ‘sky’ I cant stand empty skies. I much prefer colour and clouds or in this case an amazing storm moving past us – perfect! We enjoyed the vista overlooking Paris and the Eiffel Tower from the Trocadero, and wandered down through the gardens and fountains to a little carousel near the Seine.

The final stop on our journey was La Louvre. They had noticed that the Metro at La Louvre was amazing, with sculptures set in little niches of the walls all along the platform. We played with some awesome reflections here, catching the Metro trains whistling by alongside the ancient art, with Heidi, my assistant, killing it with the off camera flash and MagSphere (there, you got a mention!). Above ground the weather was closing in once again, but this hadn’t put off the crowds of tourists. The sky was perfect again and we went for some ‘big picture, little people’ photographs picking them out against the lightness of the fountains. It was a really memorable day and I loves the challenges it threw me. I’m really looking forward to photographing their wedding in just a few weeks time!

The next day I took a walk up to Montmartre for some street photography with my Fuji camera. You can view those images here.