Life in Bordeaux by sanjeevdeo

I got into photography due to nature. Underwater photography first, then landscapes... If I could choose any genre to photograph (on dry land) I would pick natural landscapes. BUT, over the past 18 months of travelling I haven't always been able to choose to be out in nature. Sure Europe has some beautiful landscapes (I see them every day on 500px!). But being from little young New Zealand, the main places we want to do is visit the cities, see the old buildings, and take in all the history that we don't have back home. This means that a lot of my photos recently have been city shots. While I might choose to shoot natural landscapes if I could, I feel like I am learning a lot by shooting scenes that aren't necessarily 'in my comfort zone'. City shots pose a whole lot of challenges that I don't necessarily have when I am hiking in the middle of nowhere... Different compositions, people constantly in your scene, cars, car lights, street lights, building lights, buildings that look terrible when they show any distortion... and most importantly to me; the artistic challenge of deciding how I want a scene to look, and then somehow creating that image despite all of the above challenges :) Anyway, that was a bit of a ramble about my current state of photography. All in all I am really enjoying taking some different styles of shots and hopefully the skills I am learning will be helpful when I get back to NZ and start primarily shooting landscapes again. About this shot... I initially planned to go and shoot at Pont de Pierre. I got up early before sunrise and wandered down there, but there was a big grey cloud hanging on the horizon that lacked any texture, so I gave up on that and turned around to go to Place de la Bourse. Here they sky was clear, so I wasn't planning on having a very interesting sunrise sky, but I thought that I could try and portray people's early morning journeys. As it turned out a beautiful bunch of clouds blew into the scene at the perfect time and lit up... but still people carried on there way. I feel like this shot shows how busy life can be. All of these people are wandering straight through this beautiful scene, with amazing architecture, on such a wonderful morning. Maybe they are enjoying themselves taking it all in. Maybe they are just rushing to work... Who knows but them! Thanks for looking at my photo. And thanks for reading (if you could be bothered!). via 500px http://j.mp/1BxhgQZ