I suppose with a trip to Paris it deserves a lovely to do list before I head off. Don’t want to forget anything since I hardly get to holiday much. If you can think of more things to add or places you’d recommend feel free to comment, especially those native people 
(though it’s a bit late :()
Anyhow, here’s a list of things I need to bring/pack/buy:
- Tickets
- Passport
- Wallet
- Phone (emergancies and pre/post paris)
- Euro adaptors (got 2 woo)
- Euros
- Tripod and remote/ext (want to take some scenary shots with me and Alice in them)
- dslr with all memory cards (raw baby)
- Clothes
- Toothbrush etc
- ipod
- ipod charger adaptor (phone and ipod uses usb!)
Here are places to go and things to do, feel free to suggest anything, Alice won’t read this hehe:
- Eiffel fucking tower
- Take stereotypical photo of it and perhaps lash kev’s photo of it
- Go cafe’ing inside Eiffel
- Buy a small eiffel tower for Alice
- The lourve
- That arc thingy
- Buy a beret! Need to look like a native french person :p
- Make fists with feet on carpet, die hard style (not plane trip but meh, it’s a tradition)
- Try a snail nigiri
- Some candlelit action, either small restaurant or picnic
- french bread, nom nom
- check out opera house del phantom
Update
Well, I actually did everything I put on the list so that’s pretty epic
Haven’t had a holiday abroad for years and years. It’s pretty depressing that I don’t have that time to just chillax and get away from it all. So yeah, Alice is currently travelling around in Europe however (dunno if using “however” is a cool idea) one of her locations is Paris, and that’s where I’ll be meeting her Here’s her at uka’s place, really jealous that she’s meeting all sorts of people abroad.
I really like uka’s green walls, wish I could pull it off in my room, but I get the feeling I’d go crazy if I spent too much time around it (even though green is my favourite colour) Right now my walls are nice and blue and they make me feel quite calm :).
So yeah, will be taking photos of Paris trip like a motherbitch, any ideas of where to go? Except the dead obvious ones. The plan was to originally meet up at the Eiffel Tower (not at the station, bang on at the Tower) but hey, we’re practical people and I’m arriving after work so I’ll be seeing Alice at the station. Will be fun!
I dislike deleting photos I take, these days when I come back from a gig I have about 500 shots that I need to sort out, pick and then upload onto flickr. Now usually in gig environments you’ll discover that there’s a high ratio of crap shots and good shots purely because of crazy fans pushing you, random hands in the way, or the band moving too fast etc but once you throw all them out you have about 100-200 shots of nice shots.
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“.
From good old Indexed.
I was able to grab a ticket at the last minute and go see the band play at a very respectable and epic venue, the Royal Albert Hall, which is renowned for it’s awesome acoustics and dazzling lightings (saw a few musicals there beforehand). It was all part of the Teenage Cancer Trust charity and made everyone feel happy inside that they’ve donated some money from it all. Anyway, I’m sure most of the information can be found at Musewiki so I’ll get straight into the review.
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
