The day before I was to fly back to New Zealand, I took photos around Paris. I had around 20 exposures left on my roll of Kodak Portra 400, and as I was going to enter a fortnight of MIQ or Managed Isolation and Quarantine in a hotel in Auckland, I thought I might as well finish off the roll.
As its name suggests, Portra 400 is designed primarily for portraits. It tends to produce a fine-grain, low-contrast, desaturated look that’s faithful to skin-tones and flattering to people. When you shoot it outside, especially pushed a stop, you tend to get a low-key dreamy look that can recall an eternal summer.
But before I had begun using Portra 400, I think I had a roll of Fuji Superia X-TRA 400 in my camera. As you can probably tell by the following two photos, the higher contrast, cooler hues and more visible grain suggest that they weren’t shot on Portra, but almost certainly on a Fuji film stock.
Once I had finished that roll, I inserted the roll of Portra, which I had picked up from a camera store in the 11th arrondissement. I had been watching analog photography YouTubers who recommended overexposing Portra 400.
The first place I really began shooting it was in the snow. It was a freezing day in Paris with temperatures below zero. I had been shooting with my Ricoh GRii, but after a little while it began to fail. As snow landed on the camera and melted into water, it seeped into the system, producing a strange sort of malfunction. The camera acted as if the ‘right’ direction button was always being pressed, causing the ISO to shift all the way to the right to 25,600 ISO. Not surprisingly, at such a high sensitivity, no matter how hard the camera tried to compensate by adjusting shutter speed and aperture, all the images started coming out blindingly bright.
Due to my haywire GRii and an iPhone that was fading badly in the sub-zero conditions, I had to take out my Nikon FM2n, an old 1980s film camera, if I were to have any chances of capturing snow on camera. As my FM2n is built like a tank, it seems to function well in any weather. Even on that day, when it wouldn’t stop snowing, I had no doubts that it could handle the conditions.
But due to the cold, the viewfinder had become so fogged-up that I couldn’t be sure of what I was shooting — or whether whatever I was shooting was even in focus.
Aside from that, the only thing I was unsure about was myself. As my hands had gone numb and I’d lost sensation in my fingers, I had to use my thumb to press the trigger — a pose which was as awkward as it sounds. Luckily, the photos I took at that moment didn’t turn out too badly. While the focus was a little off at times, the compositions themselves were mostly fine.
As it doesn’t snow very often in Paris, when it does people tend to go haywire. It’s only natural, of course: when you don’t know when you’ll ever see snow again, you try to make the most of it.
I once saw people tobogganing down the snow-covered slope in the Parc-des-Buttes-Chaumont, seemingly having no qualms about potentially falling over and hurting themselves. While I wasn’t so brave, I was happy with just taking in the moment.
The snow had mostly melted by the following day, but the weeks of January remained cold.
Then, when the end of February arrived, I found myself with a few dozen more exposures left to shoot. The realisation that I was about to leave France without any substantial knowledge of when I might be able to return made me strangely trigger-happy. On my final full day in Paris, I went around the city and captured whatever caught my eyes.
It was a beautiful sunny day. Cold, but not cold enough to make walking around a challenge. The perfect winter’s day, you could say, if such a vision of perfection didn’t include snow.
I walked around the Jardin du Luxembourg and got myself a crêpe. Sitting outside while eating it was a little bit cold, but the sunshine helped keep the worst of the chill at bay.
Due to the high number of Covid cases, a lot of institutions were still forbidden from opening. Cafés and theatres that would normally be teeming with people still kept the world at a distance.
It was also still compulsory to wear masks out in public, and while most people complied, some stubbornly resisted.
Following the park, I walked into the Latin Quarter, heading past the Sorbonne and towards Notre Dame.
I then crossed the bridge and headed towards the Jardin des Tuileries on the other side of the Seine river.
It wouldn’t be another twelve until I returned to Paris again. As that chapter came to a close, another one was about to begin.
