Painting Montmartre
Ah, the cafe life in Paris!
This won't exactly be a newsflash, but I just have to say it: Paris is awesome. There, I got that out of the way early in this post! And it is so true. You hear it so often that it's essentially a cliche now. But that is how things become cliches - they are just plain true.
Paris. Is. Awesome.
But Paris is a large city with a lot of things to see and do (and I have a list of places that are great for photography in Paris - hopefully I can return and add more to it!), and there are a lot of different areas to explore. You really never can see it all, but it's sure fun to try!
I loved the long shadows that the building cast on the street in this one.
I was there last summer with the family for about a week (that would be in June 2013, not this most recent summer - time flies!) and while I have shared some shots from there, I haven't really shared that many. And I do not know why.
It's probably that because of my travels, I am frequently shooting, and when it comes time to process photos, I generally think of the recent ones first. With a lot of trips over the course of a year, you can see how I start to forget about things. I get busy and process a few of the new shots, then move on to the next trip.
Here I liked how "Le Ronsard" is clear but most of the rest of the details are much softer.
Today I am going to correct that a slight bit and get these shots from Paris out there for ya! Specifically, I took all of these one afternoon while wandering around the Montmartre section of Paris. The area is best known for Sacre Couer, but today's shots are mostly just street scenes I came across and found interesting enough to shoot.
Interestingly, I had processed all these shots and had them sitting on my desktop, ready to be posted. But whenever it came time to create a blog post, I kept skipping them in favor of other shots from other places.
In other words, I wasn't inspired by the photos that I had taken.
Sitting at cafes in Paris - it's the life! (though I was busy shooting mostly)
So, I did what I have been doing more and more of lately - I decided to get creative. With the exception of two of these (which two should be fairly obvious I hope!), I processed them in Topaz Simplify so that I could turn them into a sort of digital painting. They became works of art, instead of just photographs. They came to life.
And now, I love them. Thank you, Topaz Simplify!
And by the way, I have a full review of Topaz Simplify here. It's a great product, and I am using it a lot now to bring life to an otherwise dull photo. It really gets me thinking creatively.
This is the HDR photo that I used as the basis for the painted version below...and I liked this one as an HDR...
...and this is how it looks "painted". I like it even better now!
And then you know what I realized? Montmartre used to be the home of some of the greatest artists ever - Picasso, van Gogh, Monet and others. I guess that's why I had never been able to get them off of my desktop and onto the blog. Something was keeping them there. Something kept me from sharing the photos. I guess they just needed to be turned into art.
Funny how things work out, isn't it?
Window shopping in Montmartre.
And in case you are the curious type (like me), I figured I should share at least one photo of Sacre Coeur. This was previously shared here a long time ago, so perhaps you missed it. And then of course, below it is the painted version, since I am in an artistic mood today!
I will have to come back and do another post on Sacre Coeur by itself. It's deserving of course, and I do have quite a few pics of it, as you can probably imagine. Sadly, there is a strict rule of no photography inside (and it's got an INCREDIBLE interior), so all my photos are from the outside. But, that's ok, I still love them.
This one has been shared here before. It's an HDR photo of the facade of Sacre Coeur.
And here is the painted version. It's quite a bit more colorful, but that's half the fun with art, right?
I will end with a quote about art that I really like:
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
- Oscar Wilde
