We started our morning with some breakfast, Alice brought her Jam along and used it to spread on her croissant whilst I enjoyed it with a touch of butter. The breakfast was the same as yesterday so we were pretty certain that the breakfast is going to be the same throughout. Today we were going to do some shopping at the Galeries Lafayete. This store was the equivalent to London’s Harrods or Selfridge’s, a big shopping centre with top quality brands selling top quality stuff at high high prices. We obviously didn’t buy much here but it was definitely fun to look at. Alice bought some nice jewellery and some postcards. Not much happened in the store expect for the story about this random French lady with two chicken fillets (which I’ll tell another day).

After that we tried finding the Opera house where good old Eric lives. It was quite close to the shopping centre and was a sight to see. The gold statues were pretty epic. One day I think I’ll have to book some tickets to check the Opera out, it’s just super fancy. The weather was nice and hot, you can start to taste another person’s sweat in the air. Anyway, afterwards we went for some Lunch. We went to a nice little sandwich shop which sold toasted baguettes. I had bacon whilst Alice had the ham, now the funny thing that struck me was whether or not there were much difference in a hot bacon and a hot ham sandwhich, we switched our sandwiches during the halfway mark (so we got a taste of both) and to be honest, you couldn’t really taste the difference (meat wise, the cheese was definitely distinguishable). I was starting to love baguettes and croissants in Paris, they take more time and effort to make these bad boys (what with the whole freshly baking them and all).

Afterwards we had a walk around the town, we saw a Zavvi and went in to check out Shrek. We noticed that there was a hard rock cafe close by I was keen on going there another evening to dine. Anyway, our next stop was the Arc de Triomph, and to get to there we took the Metro to Avenue Des Champs-élysées (see, I did the accents and all). It was a nice walk, some fancy shops to check out (including an Orange shop that sold iphones :P) and some fancy water fountain close by. At one point we noticed a very chavy east end Londoner next to us whilst we were crossing the road, it was hilarious hearing them speak. We did some impressions of it but none of us were able to re-enact the sheer stupidity of a east end accent.

When we arrived at the Arc we took some nice photos of it and went right under it for some tourist action. There was a giant flag hanging under the Arc which everyone had to get a photo of (otherwise you wouldn’t believe we were in France and all) and not to forget the swarm of tourists taking photos left right and centre. Alice wanted to wait a bit since it looked like they were holding an event for the veterans. Sadly the process dragged on for a bit and we decided to go home instead since we were tired from all the walking.

After getting a wee bit lost again (we were slowly getting used to the metro system (well alice anyway, I was just following her :$)) we arrive back in the hotel, hungry for some place to eat. Originally I had a leaflet for a place called Fukushimirmairmair (some Japanese place). With me, when I’m too lazy to finish off a word I tend to just make up some words. I would find the actual leaflet of it (have it somewhere) but I’m too lazy to spell it out correctly, I know however that the first 6-7 letters are correct. But yeah, the entire evening I keep calling it “f**k y*u mummas”. I really should read things properly, but meh, sometimes it’s fun making the end bit up. We looked at the place and they didn’t sell anything special, I was tempted to get some yakisoba and tempura action going on so we decided to go out and find a decent sushi place.

It was funny how there were so many sushi restaurants in Paris, it reminded me of New York and it’s crazy amounts of Sushi places too. Perhaps other countries are picking up the increased interest in sushi, that or we just kept walking into Sushi places. We ended up at this nice little sushi place we picked after a long walk around our neighbourhood. We were pretty amazed that they served stuff in proper boards and boats (kev went to one with boats too). The place was run by a cute chinese family (no way were they speaking in Japanese) where the son serves sushi AND does deliveries. He’s however only a japanese waiter when he puts on that apron. We found it funny how the apron became his identity for what role he was doing. Anyway, the food was amazing, we had some yakisoba, prawn tempura (YUM!) and a nice selection of sushi / yakitori. Alice really enjoyed the sushi there and understood what it meant when we had fish that melted in your mouth. The rice was nice and warm and the fish was cold which made it perfect for some fish melting action (unlike places where the rice is cold because it’s left in the refrigerator). We paid the bill and went back to the hotel for the rest of the evening.

Each day was jam packed with events and places to visit and take photos of, most of which will pretty much give you an idea of what we done for the 5 nights in Paris. So lets begin with the evening where I arrive in Paris after work and the next day where we visit the Louvre and Eiffel Tower.

Its weird sleeping in London and waking up in Paris
Getting there was pretty easy, I left work very early to ensure I wasn’t going to miss the Eurostar, I was told that I needed to be 30 minutes early to ensure I was checked in and everything. The train was at 6pm but I arrived at 4.45pm, slightly early but just in time for some last minute money exchange (thought I needed some emergency funds and didn’t want to go near any cashpoint machines). Once that was done it was straight to St Pancras to be checked in and frisked by security for metallic objects (not really, not going to be a dumbass and make those machines bleep).

I remember travelling on St Pancras, oh how things have changed now, everything is more done up and the station is now sporting a glassy exterior look. When boarding on the train I was able to use one of those ultra slow flat escalators (which always reminds me of the gun scene in die hard 2) that took forever to reach its destination (and you couldn’t walk yourself because there’s ALWAYS someone who blocks the “walking” path so you have no means but to whistle behind them so that they get the point and move out of the way, in this case I just told them to move it hehe). Anyway, once that’s all done I was in the Eurostar, painfully accompanying some guy who had a Mac Book Pro with him, playing Crysis on dual booted windows (grr), I went online for a bit and then fell asleep. Its weird sleeping in London and waking up in Paris.

Gare de Nord and meeting Alice

Upon waking up in Paris, I immediately notice a few things; there are double decker trains, impressive (for people who haven’t seen double decker trains)! Alice was waiting at the platform and it was just amazing to see her again :). We went back to the hotel and along the way, I got some sushi to takeaway since I was hungry, Alice had already eaten but she did have a cheeky taste on some. Our hotel was tiny in a cute way, the reviews really put me off at first saying how small and tiny it is but it was grand! Granted the hotel I stayed in at New York was amazing (3 star hotel too, but with a 32 inch LCD and a marble bathroom, as well as a safe, iron and other bits and bobs) but nonetheless my expectations of a hotel room was one that had a bed since I can sleep on a flight of stairs if needs be (haha!). So yeah, it was a tiring evening and there were lots to do tomorrow so we called it a night. BAM!

Morning’s here! The morning’s here! Sunshine is here!

Woke up nice and early (well we had to). Alice ordered breakfast in the canteen for the time we were staying in the hotel so we didn’t need to find a place to eat. Personally I would have opted to eat outside but it was nice being able to just wake up and head down for breakfast. The lift was epically TINY! It could only fit 3 people and it was one of those retro lifts where you had to open a door to get into the lift. The breakfast at the hotel was simple, just cornflakes, coffee, one croissant, one breadroll, eggs and other bits of continental stuff. It wasn’t really a buffet since we were given croissants when we sat down so we couldn’t get seconds, but nonetheless it was alright. Alice wasn’t too fond of croissants (neither was I to be honest (there’s a whole story behind it all)) but we ate them anyway, Alice wanted some strawberry jam on it and the ones in the basket were yuck. I rather enjoyed the croissant strangely, perhaps having NICE French croissants instead of the soft and prepacked croissants you get in Sainsburys was why? Anyway, that’s all from breakfast, time to head to the Louvre.

Hotel des Invalides

We found these trees and decided to take photos around it.

The louvre / lourve

This and the Eiffel tower were the two places we HAD to go during the trip, not attending is like going to Jerusalem and not visiting the Sexateria. We decided to head to the Louvre first since there’s usually a queue to enter and we wanted to appreciate the art before having it diluted and raped by tourists (a certain painting comes to mind). The louvre was renown for hosting several famous pieces of art in the world (a certain painting comes to mind) so it was only right to check them out, before that, random browsing at sculptures.

We got creative with the sculptures and decided to play a game of mimicking them, luckily noone was about in the sculptures section which meant we were able to execute the poses without much embarrassment (plus I don’t think visitors would appreciate me running away like a girl after being caught). We used whatever we had as props and did some rather funny shots and poses.

The visit was immense, as well as seeing that certain painting that comes to mind and the Venus de milo, we were pretty much “enriched” by the art. It was quite a lot to take in but nonetheless interesting as ever, the building itself was amazing, we went outside to take photos of it and did a few shots of us by it too (tourist shots for the win). We (when I say we, I meant just Alice) got attacked by tourists asking us (again alice) to take photos of them, I avoided confrontation with people and just went about and did my business. After that, it was straight to the Eiffel Tower for some painful stair climbing and touristing.

Want an Eiffel Tower keyring *ching ching*

What’s the first thing that comes into your mind when you think of the city “Paris”? Eiffel Tower? So where do you think 100% of all tourists go when they visit Paris? That’s right, the damn Tower, now before you question my statement of 100% tourists going to the Tower and tell me stories of people who went to Paris and didn’t see the Tower, well they’re not tourists so my fact is still correct. Anyway, the point was, this place is the tourist wallet magnet (not a magnet for your wallet :P), everyone’s trying to make a business out of the area. One type in particular are those who sell Eiffel Tower keyrings. They reminded me of the folks who hand people the London Lite or The London Paper in that sometimes you just want to beat the crap out of them with whatever they’re selling (in this case, their Eiffel Tower merchandise). The feeling of beating them up with their own merchandise rose when they approached you and shook their damn ring of Eiffel Towers (the keyrings were all attached to a giant metal ring so you could carry them in one hand, and shake them to get people’s attention / make them hit you). The whole system made me sick, I’m surprised a few people actually bought them, though I was more annoyed in how they could just shake their ring as a sign of salesmanship (or the international language of “buy my damn Eiffel Tower, I speak your language therefore you are like a brother to me and I’d only offer my brother an offer that juicy that you cannot refuse”. So yeah, I obviously steered clear of these people (in case I gave one the old one-two) and just focused on taking the odd photo of the Tower.

Man it was hard taking photos of the place, my kit lens couldn’t handle it so I had to make compromises in how I composed the shots. They turned out pretty well I must say, me and Alice then queued up to climb the Eiffel Tower. There was a lift service but we felt that was cheating (plus it was for losers) and made sure we climbed every step of the tower (well I occasionally skipped a step so don’t read into the line too much). The queue was pretty long but eventually we made it, you would think the queue would be pretty quick but these cashiers had to service loads of tourists who don’t necessarily speak French (or English in some cases). Luckily Alice was my translator for the entire trip. She was pretty amazing at it and didn’t have trouble in talking to the natives.

The painful painful climb through the tower

Boy those stairs were painful, and to climb them with tight jeans was just suicide. Once arriving to the first level, we stopped for a quick break and croissant. The prices were high but not as crazy as I expected (though 3 euros for a cup of coke was a bit too much). After finishing off the croissant with loads of crumbs in the floor, we went and took some photos of the place and continued our journey to level 2. We were now more prepared on the stair climb. I wasn’t that put off by it since I swear the stairs in covent garden were more painful to climb. Once at the second level we took some more photos and continued to the top of the towerrgh.

Queuing was pretty painful, once at the top the view was pretty epic, it was nice and sunny so it was perfect to view and take photos of. We weren’t at the top for long, we then began our descend back to ground level. Along the way we were able to pay a visit to the gift shop. I bought Alice a small Eiffel Tower since she sent me one ages ago and I had promised to give her one back. It was nice to make those promises and eventually do them. There was a wee problem though, the new Eiffel Towers had the word “Paris” printed on it. It was so ugly, I mean, do you really need the word “Paris” to show that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris? Maybe the level of sophisticated tourists *shuffles lapel* is on a decline. I eventually looked a few other gift shots and got Alice an Eiffel Tower with the word Paris more subtly written on the tower. Once back down on the tower, we took a few shots of us behind the tower.

Start stirring that egg

After Eiffel tower we started to get painfully lost in the metro system, the damn double decker buses kept stopping out of nowhere leaving us confused to where we were suppose to go. We eventually asked a member of staff for directions and found our way back to the hotel. We then went hunting for pizza, Alice had a strong craving for it so we walked around our hotel neighbourhood to find one. We eventually found a cute little Pizza place and decided to dine there. Alice ordered her Pizza whilst I got a nice spagnola with carbonara sauce. It came with a cracked egg which I had to pour and stir away before eating (which was fun) and yeah, the meal was nice. We were a bit peckish still afterwards so we went to a supermarket and got some croissants to eat at the hotel room. Alice also bought some jam since the jam this morning was horrific and we were intending on bringing it to the table for breakfast too. I think that was it for tonight, our feet were knackered from all the walking in the museum (4 hours worth) and more walking up the Eiffel tower (my legs were shaking after climbing down the tower (as Alice noted)).

So yeah, next day involves a shopping trip and visiting the Arc de Triomph.

Now what happens next? Do I upload them all? Now if all shots were unique then hell yeah, upload them all, but this is from one gig. A magazine doesn’t show millions of photos for one gig so neither should I. It’s only best to strip out all the similar but not as epic shots and only keep the epic ones. That means comparing them against one and another and SLOWLY killing the photos off. It usually takes hours to do and is a toughie when the photos are all sharp and presentable. I do have a few rules of deciding which photo goes through, usually judging on how interesting the lights are, and how dynamic the musician’s pose is. Once we’ve declared the winners, we start killing loads of photos that are simply “bad duplicates“.

Once all that is done, next thing is mining out rare gems. Sometimes you can take perfect shots and they require very little photoshopping or editing to make it good, but there are cases where you actually need to crop or “black and whitify” the photos in order to make the photo nicer, usually killing distractions or focusing into the musician, and sometimes these cropped or edited photos beat those natural ones. It’s more apparent with gig photography since you need to immediately focus people’s attention on the band so sometimes it’s important to get that kick and draw nailed.

So yeah, an example is this bad boy.

It’s a nice shot, but the background is quite distracting, it’s wide because when shooting, I wanted to shoot him and his foot on the pedal. But when it came on the screen, it wasn’t really that interesting, and when zooming in, I discover that the shot is pretty sharp so I was able to actually crop this and focus on just the top half of Matt, and here’s the end result.

You’ll notice that this photo has a better impact since it focuses on the subject more. The crowd is quite distracting but meh, they’ll stay for now haha. This crop was done a day after uploading the photos, I was slowly swotting down photos that people weren’t keen on looking at to keep the photo count down, but this one seemed like one of those “hmm, if i cropped it, perhaps it will look better”, and it really did. It’s definitely tough work post processing these bad boys, at the end of the day I tend to stick with about 20-30 photos (the amount you can take with the disposable camera usually) I broke the boundries with Muse but hey, it’s Royal Albert Hall :p.

So yeah, when sorting out photos, it’s a pain, but if you put the time and effort you’ll yield excellent results. I hope you all enjoyed the photos, thanks for commenting on them and all.

Oh and I spoke to a ticket tout (to research on how much they were charging) about buying Muse tickets and he said £70, tut tut. He was willing to go lower but I left since I was quite disgusted.

The gig was spectacular. They did a lot of new things, a lot of right things and all in all it was a rocking gig. When Take a bow came up I immediately gave them the nod of approval knowing full well that if Take a Bow was the opener, Knights of Cydonia will be the last song (which I prefer a lot). The acoustics were amazing as well as the lighting. Their choice of songs were really good, introducing a few new riffs as well as playing some old songs such as Fury which really lighted up the stage for the die hard fans. The highlight would be when Matt got up to the organs and played Megalomania. Really making use of the venue’s facilities. Makes you wonder if that could have been an end song? (Epic but not rocky). From the gig you would have thought Matt had learnt some new facial expressions because he was pulling all sorts of faces during the gig. The highlight songs would have been, Knights of Cydonia, Megalomania, Fury and Bliss. The balloons coming out, although old, felt like it wasn’t done in a long time, probably because you rarely GET to play with the balloons on venues such as Wembley Stadium etc. It reminded me of the Brixton gig due to it’s size and everything.

Anyway, enjoy some photos! I uploaded about 50 shots so be sure to check them all out on my flickr page

The best shot! It looks epic in big!

Looks like Matt has on tooth here!

and why not, some Matt pouting, he did this pout right after Butterflies and Hurricanes, it’s weird to think you’d make that face at the last note of it.

Anyway, what did YOU think of the gig? Post your review and experiences, how awesome was the organs for you?

A portrait of someone who doesn’t want to be seen. Unlike most people who’ve got a portrait of themselves somewhere uploaded online, I always choose not to have my photos shown. I’m simply an online avatar until you’ve actually met me, nothing can ever beat meeting a someone in person. This is a submission to the Musers’ Playground

GAAARGHHH! Handds!, this was a submission for the theme “Abracadabra” for the muser Playground, feel free to take part if you dwell in the Muse board and post some of your photos to the pool.

We went to some pub afterwards and had a chat with Michelle and her friends from Virgin. I managed to get a Big Issue card thingy the big issue sellers wear and michelle was up for wearing it and looking like a hobo hehe. All in all a good day for gigging and photo taking! The keyboardist was cute and tiny as ever! and the lead singer was fun with his engrish!

I really enjoyed the gig, will definitely catch them again next time they play! Made me listen to their stuff some more afterwards, though I had another gig lined up on the same week which I only bought! Got to love impulsive gig attending. Some epic songs during the gig were Black and A Stone

Night life at New York City, this was a submission for the theme “New” for the muser Playground, feel free to take part if you dwell in the Muse board and post some of your photos to the pool.