Naughty Paris

Tuesday starts off well enough at YOBA, a beautiful lingerie and toy boutique just off the Tuileries Gardens. The summer sales are still on, so it's hard not to do a little shopping while the model and photographer are at work.

Afterwards we go to another boutique, Phylea, which specializes in fantasy corsets and fetishwear. We get Nicole all laced up in a traditional corset and tell her not to pass out until we're done shooting. We shoot in the doorway and start drawing a small audience of bystanders. We also get her in a purple rubber dress, but after her cell phone rings in the changing room we have to wrap up as she zooms off to put out a fire back home (figurative, folks, calm down).



We all reconvene later at the Experimental Cocktail Club near Montorgueil, a stylish little design bar run by three young French gentlemen who do indeed have some fabulous cocktails! The Perfect Agave is the first cocktail with Tequila that I've ever liked (well, ever since that incident in Arizona in 1992....). I recruited some more friends to act as the "crowd", but there was already a real one there, so we had to artfully block them from view. Kirsten had half the bar sign model releases in the end anyway, just in case.

The model was sick of me always hiding behind the camera, so here I am, officially on break, drinking a Perrier (not very experimental, but it keeps me going!)

Afterwards Kirsten and I went to Le Paris-Paris to meet up with Nicolas Ullmann for the last Ullmann Cabarock of the season. We're not shooting the Paris-Paris, just picking up Nicolas so we can photograph him at Le Baron afterwards. It was absolutely packed, and Nicolas had a hard time pulling us into the door. Unfortunately we immediately lost him while he went back out to rescue more friends from the sidewalk crowd pushing against the velvet ropes.

Nicolas (left) singing at the final season Cabarock at Le Paris-Paris.

Le Baron is dark and red. And dark. And crowded and small and smoky. And it's one of the best parties in town! Butthe staff are not in a party mood since Nicolas has invited the entire crowd from Paris-Paris to come to Le Baron, which is a quarter of the size. They see Kirsten doing light tests with her huge camera and start freaking out. We explain what we're doing (and more importantly, that we're with Nicolas), but they seem intent on kicking us out. We're saved by Nicolas at the last moment, when one particularly angry gorilla looks as if he's about to rip Kirsten's camera right out of her hands.

We take a few quick snapshots and pray they'll work, thank Nicolas, and head back out into the night. Sick of the taxi search and hauling our bodies through the metro, I have wisely brought along my car for the evening. Miraculously, we found parking places directly across the street (the Parisians have already started leaving for summer vacation). It's 3am by the time I drop Kirsten off at the hotel. I tell her to be ready at 6am when I come back to pick her up for for the sunrise shots on the Champ de Mars.

To be continued...