Aamir Zakaria Photography

Paris Photography Adventure: Day 3

Wel­come to day 3 of my Paris Pho­tog­ra­phy adventure.

I was starv­ing, it was get­ting late, and I still had­n’t got­ten around to buy­ing gro­ceries, so I hit up one of the ubiq­ui­tous Turk­ish fast food estab­lish­ments.  There must be a big Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ty here, because the win­dows often say “Halal” (the Mus­lim equiv­a­lent of kosher) and there was often some Ara­bic let­ter­ing.  I also saw many women on the streets wear­ing burqas, the shawls and head­dress­es which cov­er most of their bod­ies. It was easy to pick these places out because they all had these signs with images of the slabs of meat they use to carve off for sand­wich­es.  The one in this pic­ture was closed, as were so many of the busi­ness­es here.  Appar­ent­ly, a large num­ber of Parisians skip town in August.

These “meat slabs” (for lack of a bet­ter term…) remind­ed me of what I’ve seen in Greek restau­rants when they shave off pieces with a knife to make gyro sand­wich­es.  Here, the meat is brown instead of grey, and instead of a knife, they use a machine sim­i­lar to an elec­tric razor to shave off the meat (sounds appe­tiz­ing, right?).  The ubiq­ui­ty of these restau­rants remind­ed me of the numer­ous Mex­i­can taque­rias I see in San Fran­cis­co, of which there were none that I saw in Paris.

I ven­tured inside and, once again hav­ing no idea what I was order­ing (see yes­ter­day’s post), said “Bon­jour.  Uh…kebab sand­wich.” The man at the count mere­ly gave me a nod, so I took a seat await­ing my mys­tery sand­wich.   I did­n’t exact­ly get what I thought I ordered, but it was a meat sand­wich with fries and would do.  After eat­ing at these estab­lish­ments two more times, I swore them off for­ev­er, due to the ensu­ing indigestion.

Next I head­ed to the Saint-Ger­main-Des-Près neigh­bor­hood.  There were some won­der­ful small art gal­leries, two of which focused exclu­sive­ly on pho­tog­ra­phy.  Lumas had a more eclec­tic col­lec­tion, while the Ate­lier Yann Arthus-Bertrand was the work­shop of this one par­tic­u­lar pho­tog­ra­ph­er.    I high­ly encour­age you to vis­it his work­shop or web­site, because his work is just phe­nom­e­nal!  He has become my new favorite pho­tog­ra­ph­er.  He does aer­i­al pho­tog­ra­phy, which inspired me to get an aer­i­al shot of the Eif­fel Tow­er.  I end­ed up buy­ing one of his books called The Earth From The Air, which weighs about a thou­sand pounds.

After drop­ping that off at home and fin­ish­ing up yes­ter­day’s blog, I head out to Mont­par­nasse Tow­er to get some aer­i­al views of the Eif­fel Tow­er.   Sun­set was 9:20 pm, so I got there about an hour ear­ly to set­up for a sun­set shot, and also to beat any crowds.  There is a 360 degree panoram­ic view of Paris from the 59th floor rooftop deck of Mont­par­nasse Tow­er.  It was­n’t ter­ri­bly crowd­ed when I got there, so I was able to take my time scop­ing out a good spot to set up my tri­pod.  It’s a good thing too, because it turned out I was­n’t the only one who want­ed a sun­set view from there!  It was pret­ty hazy, which it often is I’m told.  In San Fran­cis­co, the clear­er days tend to be in the win­ter.  I don’t know if that holds in Paris as well.

Because there was a lot of con­trast between the sun and the ground, I used brack­et­ed expo­sures big-time.   I took one shot at ‑3 EV which blocked out every­thing else but the sun, and once I com­bined this in with my “nor­mal” expo­sure shots with HDR pro­cess­ing, the result looked pret­ty good (see image at begin­ning of post).   The col­ors were pret­ty flat, so I increased the sat­u­ra­tion dur­ing post-processing

The sun­set looked inter­est­ing with all the hazi­ness and rain clouds in the dis­tance.  I actu­al­ly like the black and white image I made the best, my first sun­set with­out color.

After the sun went down, the city lights began turn­ing on, and the whole mood of the scene changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly, espe­cial­ly once the Eif­fel Tow­er lights came on.

I fin­ished off by cre­at­ing a panora­ma.  The iPhone works great for panora­mas, but does­n’t work so well in low light sit­u­a­tions.  With my DSLR, I took ser­i­al over­lap­ping shots and com­bined them into one image in Pho­to­shop.  Pho­to­shop fig­ures out how to line every­thing up for you.  Soft­ware nowa­days is just incredible.

I don’t know how well this panora­ma will show up on a tiny com­put­er screen, but here’s what it looks like:

I packed up my gear, and it was real­ly only then that I real­ly took in the view, with­out being focused (no pun intend­ed) on how to cap­ture the shot and keep­ing an eye on my gear.   And what a view it was!!  There’s no way to cap­ture the feel­ing of a 360 panora­ma on film, no mat­ter how hard you try.

I stopped off at the 56th floor cafe to break my junk food habit, by eat­ing a nice Cae­sar sal­ad.  Then it was back to the apart­ment to process some pictures.

Tomor­row’s weath­er looks gloomy, so for a change of pace, I’ll go to a cemetery.