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If you’re a photographer thinking about a weekend break in Paris, ditch the tour-guide and explore under your own steam… For street photographers there’s no better way to explore a city like Paris than flaneur. Baudelaire set the template as a gentleman stroller, and was picked up by cultural theorists, and Susan Sontag said “paradise is always being lost”. Jack Kerouac encouraged shoals of transients into hungering for the horizon with no clear destination in sight, or at least a flexible one, and the title of Dan Eldon’s travelogue, The Journey Is The Destination, made a catchy epithet out of the philosophy of vagrancy. There is a freedom in wandering around with no purpose, in exploring new corners, finding yourself in some hitherto unseen park or alleyway. The sense of being out of your comfort zone and alone hones your observational skills and suits photographers in foreign lands to perfection. Wandering takes you off the beaten track into new territories and is the best way to see the heart of a city. Picture this, you leave your hotel and flip a coin to turn left. Following the wind you wander amidst autumn leaves that you catch through your lens. The click of a shutter and the lights change. You cross the road and see an old man hobbling around a puddle that reflects shifting clouds. Capturing it in black and white you reflect on age, and on the image you have pressed that would never have happened on a bus-stop tour. Stepping between the cracks a fork goes to the right, through a park, you take the path less travelled, and tread new steps over grass. One day the path you pioneered will become a desired trail, a trodden mark in the landscape gathered over multiple walkers efforts navigating the terrain. But as it stands beneath you it is unmarked by other feet and leads along a shrubbery to an industrial area. There are no tourists here. Instead cranes lift and demolition balls smash the old into rubble. You capture a crumbling building as crows fly over. You see the rainbow painted by oil into a puddle, and you have been transformed by this city. Transformed by the things you have seen, by the freedom of wandering with no destination, no a to b, just the beauty of the step that follows step, one after the other into the unknown.

Omar is keen traveller and part time poet, working for family holiday specialist HotelshopUK. He loves to explore the less touristy side of popular cities, and Paris is one of his favourite.