It’s been so very different moving from Montpellier to Paris. While we were in Montpellier, almost every business presentation mentioned the quality of life and how much people wanted to live there—a point you wouldn’t expect to be as relevant and well, frequently brought up.

Now that I’m here in Paris, I understand how different it is in a town as beautiful as Montpellier. In a town with such charming architecture and relaxed pace of life, you’d almost expect their economy to be agriculturally-centric, but their primary industries are white-collared (like IT in IBM, which is a big employer). Montpellier made its name with its university of Medicine, and that sort of genteel, educated air has seemingly stuck with the people.

And while I’m here in Paris, everytime someone comes to talk to me or moves too close, I clutch my bag in petrified travellers’ paranoia, shooting them a look of mixed fear and hostility I can only guess must be effective, because it seems to work.

I am on holiday in Paris, so I have lots more free time to explore this place than I did Montpellier. One thing the two cities have in common though, is that they’re so exceedingly beautiful I’m not sure I can photograph it. It isn’t just a matter of doing justice to the beauty; it’s that there’s so much interesting architecture and people loving life that I don’t know where to begin. I fear I’ll shoot this city just like any two-bit travel photographer: superficial and easy.

By easy, I refer to shooting subjects in a staid, standard way that supports all rules of photographic aesthetics, so that your picture looks postcard-perfect. But then, that’s the problem. You have postcards, and you’ve had millions of people shooting the city in exactly that way. How do you make your pictures special? How do you make them yours?

I’ve had a little bit of time to think about this, while browing through the photo diarrhoea on my camera, thanks in part to the end of deadlines and both hotels in Montpellier and Paris showing their one, obligatory English language channel, CNN. I’m not too pleased with my pictures, and hope to make up for it tomorrow.