Ray,
Indeed, driving does remove your eye - or should -from the distractions off piste. The way we did it, during those glorious years that Ann and I roamed France en route to Scotland, was that we'd check in at the hotel late evening and spend the next couple of days with the intention of getting a load of images to offer to our stock agent. That said, you can probably understand that there is - was! - a particular style of shot that had a chance of selling to tourist businesses etc. meaning, the unbiquitous travel atmospheric, a genre that tries to encapsulate the essence of a locality in a photograph. Paris has its tower, its art districts and so on. Nobody gave a fig about down-and-outs, the panhandlers in the streets and the Metro other than to try to pretend they didn't exist. You could see the challenge for Magnum, therein. ;-)
In the end, it turned out not worth the trouble and disruption to the trips; it was even worse regarding pix of Mallorca, where the agency eventually asked me not to send in more Med atmospherics because they, as with the other agencies, were drowning in that material. Frankly, it was an early warning sign of the collapse of the stock business model as it was, even before the advent of digital. That said, in retrospect, I can also detect that situation happening across the general, non-stock photographic industry back in the 80s, an era that seemed, on the face of it, to be thriving. Being a one-man-and-his-wife operation, it was natural to assume that slower times were one's own fault, and only looking back at the fact that many competitors were shutting the doors for the final time later indicated a general, not a particular malaise. At the time, you just see your own situation.
As mentioned in the past, later photography-free trips didn't happen: heart attacks convinced my wife it was too much driving stress for me, which was not the case: I enjoyed the driving; the heart problems were cholesetrol driven. There you go.
If this apartment sells, then yes, there will be one more, final, photographic French trip: back north from down here. (If my wife was right, what a way to go!) The snaps will not be for tourism, but for my website. Wish me well!
Rob
