Even though Lyon is a nice city to take pictures of, I have been growing a bit tired of always taking the same landscapes at sunset/sunrise lately. Of course, there still is some thrill in waking up early to witness the first sunbeams of the day, or the reflections of Vieux Lyon in the peaceful waters of the Saône river, and this will continue to be one of my subject of predilection in the future. However, I wanted to find another way, more original, of photographing my city. Puddle photography, so far, has been my best answer.
As usual with any kind of photography you want to practise, there are some constraints that you can’t always manage with this kind of photography. The most obvious of them is that there needs to be puddles, i.e. either that it has rained not so long ago, or that there’s some leak or whatever reason for a puddle to form in a particular place. This actually is the reason why I eagerly wait for the rain to come these days : without rain, there are not many interesting puddles I can take advantage of. Another constraint is that you need to be out exactly when the rain has stopped to enjoy the best puddles that will give you magnificent reflections : when it rains, the drops of rain generally prevents the puddle from giving a perfect reflection of the surrounding place, and when it has stopped raining, you only have little precious time to take advantage of the puddles that have formed before the dry out.
Despite these constraints, though, I have managed to gather several photos of places of Lyon I had not yet photographed thanks to this idea. Saint-Paul district, for instance, had always been one of the places I had been wanting to photograph the most, but I had never been able to find a way to do it that could find satisfying. There’ll be more articles on puddle photography in the few weeks to come.
I hope you’ll like this series as much as I entertained taking pictures for it !
