I took a bunch of fun outfits to wear in Paris, but I actually ended up wearing pretty much just one outfit the whole time, and this is it. I did so much walking and in the end I was way more interested in being comfortable than fancy, and I had no one to impress anyway. I planned a styled bridal photo shoot while I was there and I took just one carry-on because I was not interested in having Delta loose my bag full of the entire wardrobe for my shoot. It was a Françoise Hardy inspired shoot and so one of the big pieces was a giant faux fur coat similar to the one in her iconic photos, but a shipping error left me running around Tacoma last minute scrambling to find something that would fit the wardrobe. My friend Brooke from Urban X Change pulled through last minute with one of her vintage coats, and since I didn't have any room in my bags for any other coats, it was my daily coat for walking around Paris.
I had some pretty bad jet lag that lasted almost the entire time I was there, so the morning of these photos I was up at like 4 am and decided to head down to Notre Dame and watch the sunrise over the cathedral. It was pretty cloudy, so it was more like watching it go from dark to dim, but still a moving experience. I sat there for a while taking it all in, but my style shoot was later that morning and I wanted to scout out some spots to shoot. These photos were actually test shots to see how the light in Paris looked on camera (magical, duh). Notre Dame in the background? Still so crazy to me that I was standing right there one month ago.
These are the only photos I took of myself in Paris, other than a couple selfies. Even though I'm over outfit photos, I'm so glad I took these shots of myself in Paris. Even having forgotten my tripod in my room, I found some stuff to set my camera on so I could have some shots of my tourist self standing in front of the Cathedral Notre Dame on the banks of the Seine. It's kind of funny having taken self portraits for 8 years for my outfit photos, self portraits come so naturally in terms of subject matter. I started doing a 365 photo challenge and while ideally I'd love to do more photos of other people, it's fun to do self portraits in a more artistic and interesting way, rather than taking them with the idea of showing my outfit. It feels like reclaiming ownership over my self portrait, rather than having it be for a commercial use. Maybe I'll share some of my 365 photos here (my photos of Dusty and Dan were actually some of my 365 challenge) but I'm enjoying just doing them for fun without pressure for them to be for anything.
