Nowadays, discovering a big city is a little different than before. The current process is in fact some sort of confirmation of a prior documentation and has nothing to do with the pure joy ought to be felt when discovering a new place, one you genuinely knew nothing about. In other cases, it is only a matter of ticking off items on a bucket list.

From a visual creativity point of view, such an approach builds a massive bump in the road. The creative process lacks the most important source of energy: the joy of finding something never seen before that manages to strike a chord in this complex and elusive instrument responsible with our emotions.  The current process of “tourist” confirmation of a prior documentation, leads in some cases to a monotonic or rather cartesian  artistic creation. This is because the information collected during the documentation influences or even manipulates, in a certain way, your personal way of enjoying what you see.

However, with a lot of patience and dedication you can go beyond what is described in the tourist guides and you can get to the “unknown” core of a location that will trigger something potentially unique, or at least, a creation-interpretation that is really your own. But typically,  this process takes time. This is not a bad thing …. because we all know that “any discovery is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”.

At the time I took this photo I was still in the initial non-creative phase of discovering the famous Paris.

When my friends came to Paris and we decided to go for a walk to take some pictures for my stock portfolios, I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do to be in some way original.

Generally, in such situations as a commercial photographer, there is a simple recipe. You need to follow the existing trends of the times in connection with the chosen topic. Then, you try to interpret them in a creative-controlled way, limited by these algorithmic trends.

So, what could we photograph in Paris to be commercially useful? Well, we all know that Paris means the Eiffel Tower and the City of Love. So, I turned to these two ideas. To create the image, I have used a personal trick that can often help you untangle a creativity knot and possibly catalyse the production of something unique and surprising. This is the “detail”.

Love in Paris

With these three strategic ideas in mind, I’ve made an interesting composition of the elements I had on hand, adapted to that location. In this way I came to another creative idea: framing the elements in the image by other existing elements. The Eiffel Tower is partially “blurry and asymmetrically” framed by their legs.

Then, in post-production I adjusted the colours a bit to give the image a retro touch, which again, perfectly fits with the general vibe of Paris.

And this is how  “Love in Paris” was born…a “mind-child” with increasingly good impact on the stock photography market.