Mont­martre Photos

When I was in Paris last month I took a lot of film photos with my trusty old Pentax ME Super. As well as some reli­able rolls of HP5, I had a load of colour negat­ive film I got at Pound­land a while back. I think it was expired, and the photos had a bit of a red/​magenta tinge and were quite grainy despite being 200 asa film. They were mostly usable though after some colour correc­tion, although you can see why people use slide film for land­scape photo­graphy. I’ve been scan­ning the photos, and will post them in small batches every now and then, so there isn’t a huge block of just photos of Paris.

These are some photos of Mont­martre. The last time I was there was on a summer’s even­ing in 2005. Early in the morn­ing in Janu­ary was quite a differ­ent exper­i­ence!

I wandered up from near the Opera (where the hotel was) through back streets up to the top of the hill, where the church is. I think it’s a much better route. You see lots of inter­est­ing tucked-away things, and avoid crowds and having to climb lots of steps.

There are a lot of steps up to Sacre Coeur.

I liked this enorm­ous dove­cote behind the church. It’s just wait­ing for the arrival of some eagle-sized pigeons.

The view from the top is pretty spec­tac­u­lar. There were a lot of selfie sticks in evid­ence here. I nearly got smacked in the face with one multiple times. I was there on a week­day morn­ing in the dead­est part of the tour­ism year and there were still plenty of people, albeit only in front of the church to get the photo to tick off their list (the other streets were deser­ted) and leave quickly (I have never under­stood this approach to travel, or indeed, life). God knows what it’s like on a Saturday in peak season. Shud­der.

It’s much easi­er going down the steps than it is climb­ing them.

This art centre with a cafe and book­shop looked really appeal­ing, espe­cially as it had an outsider art exhib­i­tion on, but it wasn’t open for the day yet when I was there. I’ll have to return anoth­er time.