Getting up close.
Often when photographers are in different surroundings, out of there comfort zone, they tend to document the obvious and not get what’s in the details of a scene. Stepping back and gaining a fresh perspective first, then taking pictures is what helps me get into it. Not shooting the same thing as the guy with the 300mm lens beside you, but walking in and shooting up close with a 28mm.
Catacombes de Paris, France
The Catacombs of Paris are an underground ossuary located south of the former cities gate. The Ossuary hold the remains of around 6 million people. If you are photographing down in the catacombs make sure to bring a tripod with you as the lighting is minimal. As you could imagine the feeling is creepy but very interesting as you wonder miles of underground tunnels. They do check your bag at the end of the tour making sure you didn’t place a skull in your backpack to make a candle out of…well for me anyway.
The Catacombs entry is in the western pavilion of Paris’s former Barrière d’Enfer city gate. After descending a narrow spiral stone stairwell of 19 metres to the darkness and silence broken only by the gurgling of a hidden aqueduct channelling local springs away from the area, and after passing through a long (about 1.5 km) and twisting hallway of mortared stone, visitors find themselves before a sculpture that existed from a time before this part of the mines became an ossuary, a model of France’s Port-Mahon fortress created by a former Quarry Inspector. Soon after, they would find themselves before a stone portal, the ossuary entry, with the inscription Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la Mort (‘Halt! This is the empire of the Death’).
Beyond begin the halls and caverns of walls of carefully arranged bones. Some of the arrangements are almost artistic in nature, such as a heart-shaped outline in one wall formed with skulls embedded in surrounding tibias; another is a round room whose central pillar is also a carefully created ‘keg’ bone arrangement. Along the way one would find other ‘monuments’ created in the years before catacomb renovations, such as a source-gathering fountain baptised “La Samaritaine” because of later-added engravings.
Wide Open Studios 