Traveling Lens

Nice - South of France - Sunset in the Streets

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I have been slowly going through my photos from South of France which has proven to be a gargantuan task considering the sheer amount of content that I ended up with from each city I visited.

I plan on posting quite a few photo-sets from each city as well as separate in-depth photo posts highlighting some of the unique aspects of each place. And, of course, I will also do the same for Paris since I ended up spending 10 days in Paris after the South of France journey was over.

While I was in France, I posted quite a few photos in-the-moment and I typically did that with my cameras (I brought along my Sony corral which included the: A6000, A7R, and A7) by uploading the photos from the camera directly to my phone where I did super-quick edits of them using iOS photo-apps before posting them to , , and my travel blog.

This photo means a lot to me.

It was taken on the first evening that I was in Nice.

The light was light I dreamed about when I was younger and would bury my head in books about far-off sun-drenched locations.

I didn’t grow up in a family that traveled since my family didn’t have the means to travel. My father worked nights as a pressman for the Daily News, a fact which I was ashamed of when I was in grade school since it seemed like most of my peers had parents who had glamorous white-collar jobs which afforded them the means to travel. It took my parents 10 years to save up enough money to take a 2 week European vacation back in the 1990s without feeling intense guilt about allocating those funds for something other than necessities.

And so, when I travel, I always get a bit emotional along the way (that’s a bit of an understatement). My eyes well-up when I think of how much I yearned to be able to experience travel when I was younger. And while travel is part of my career in photography, it’s still constantly amazing to me that I even get the opportunity to do what I do.

I posted another version of this photo a month ago on the evening when it was taken. I stood there in Vieux Nice with the other journalists who were traveling with me and we all took turns admiring the light and capturing it with our cameras.

I insisted we all do that because I knew this was the light that people dream about.

It’s the kind of light that keeps you going even in your darkest hours when you are trying to claw your way into the life you have always wanted to live.

And it’s the kind of light that just knowing it exists in reality is enough to keep the dreams alive.

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