The Shooting Gallery: Vivre La France!

I just got back from a week long vacation in Paris. What a wonderful city!
I must say it lived up to the hype - the atmosphere was great, romantic and surreal at the same time, and the history held in that city was stunning. Parisians are also a charming bunch, quite helpful and friendly.
We stayed in La Defense, which is a 5 min train ride from the city center which turned out to be a great choice as it was much much less touristy and you could thus get a nice feel for what the natives did :)

I was able to shoot a lot of photos and i was quite satisfied with my collection at the end. I tried to focus my photos on the people and events of Paris rather than monuments. I always find that to make the much more interesting photo. Paris is probably one of the most photographed cities in the world and I doubt another monument shot from me is going to really add anything.

I learned a lot, not just about the culture and history of Europe, but how to shoot better travel photos. My biggest lesson? Look away from the main attractions to see stories unfolding everywhere.
For example, there were a lot of pigeons in the city and I noticed you'd always find kids enjoying themselves running through the flocks disturbing them and I tried to catch this:

Tourists were everywhere! We all did the same thing too, photographing everything in sight :) Standing in front of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, I felt like a paparazzi photographer! And that's when I thought, well that would be a great story by itself!

And finally, people were out late every night in Paris. It truly lives up to its name of "City of Lights", so I wanted to convey that somehow, and I didnt want to use the typical 'lit-up eiffel tower' shot to do so. So I did the typical "cafes at night" shot instead :)

I had my 17-55 F2.8 on my camera the whole time for the trip, something I've never done before. The main reason was that I was shooting much more in street/candid style and this lens was the best choice to get the angles one needed to capture enough of the picture to tell a story. It truly is a fantastic lens - very sharp and fast.

The travel bug has definitely hit me so now i'm off to plan my next trip :)