Aamir Zakaria Photography

Paris Photography Adventure: Day 2

On Day 2 of my Paris pho­tog­ra­phy adven­ture, I con­tin­ued to focus on the Eif­fel Tow­er, as I will for most of my trip.

I’m real­ly glad I still remem­ber bits and pieces of French from high school.  It def­i­nite­ly helps, espe­cial­ly know­ing the num­bers!  I was expect­ing to encounter more peo­ple who speak Eng­lish, but it did­n’t seem that way.  I will say “bon­jour” to them and feel all pleased with myself, but then they shoot back some actu­al French at me and I’m often befud­dled!  Order­ing food is espe­cial­ly a prob­lem.   Because my French is so poor, I have a hard time deci­pher­ing the menu (there are no Eng­lish sub­ti­tles, unless it’s a real touristy spot), and if they don’t speak Eng­lish, I’m toast (so to speak).  I have end­ed up order­ing sev­er­al meals where I had no idea what I ordered!  Luck­i­ly, I’m not par­tic­u­lar­ly picky when it comes to food.   The cof­fee here is amaz­ing, and every meal seem to involve large quan­ti­ties of bread!

As night pho­tog­ra­phy is one of my spe­cial­ties, I made a night­time vis­it to the Eif­fel Tow­er. The days are very long this time of year, and sun­set did­n’t occur until 9:21 pm!  That’s just as well, because I got to sleep in longer.

I took the Metro to the Tro­cadero sta­tion (learn­ing the sys­tem was a major accom­plish­ment).  The Tro­cadero Plaza is a good first stop on the Eif­fel Tow­er pho­tog­ra­phy tour.   It was still bustling with activ­i­ty at 11 pm, with tourists from around the world, snack stands, and sou­venir ven­dors.  There was an espe­cial­ly large num­ber of immi­grant ven­dors sell­ing col­ored light-emit­ting sou­venirs which they were throw­ing up into the air.  It made for a pret­ty sight!

I climbed down to the bot­tom of the plaza, and it was hard to get a clear view, because of all the tourists and because the access to the far end is blocked off.  So I wan­dered around a bit, scram­bled up to a spot where I prob­a­bly was­n’t sup­posed to be, and found a van­tage point to take a few good shots.

Then I decid­ed to wan­der down to street lev­el, and a bunch of foun­tains turned on out of nowhere.  Because I left my cam­era attached to my tri­pod (as I often do), it was easy to set up and let ‘er rip.

You’ll notice a blue bea­con at the top of the tow­er.  I had to make sev­er­al attempts to cap­ture this.  With a slow shut­ter speed, I could­n’t cap­ture a small­er slice in time, so I opened up my aper­ture to f/4.0 and went with a 1.6 sec­ond expo­sure time.  I left my ISO at 100, which I can almost always do when I have a tri­pod.  F/4.0 would­n’t have worked very well if I want­ed to keep both the foun­tains and the tow­er in focus, but since I did­n’t care about the foun­tains, it worked fine.   I kept the com­po­si­tion as pre­cise­ly sym­met­ri­cal as possible.

Next, I con­tin­ued to head down to street lev­el to get a clos­er shot.  I prac­ti­cal­ly got run over cross­ing the street, as I did­n’t quite under­stand the sig­nals!  I found an inter­est­ing pat­tern of street lights which I want­ed to include in my com­po­si­tion, and by using a long expo­sure (30 sec) I was able to cap­ture some beau­ti­ful col­ored trails from the tail­lights of the cars that were dri­ving by.  I used a small aper­ture (f/22) to get that pret­ty spark­ing effect around the street lights, which I real­ly love.

By this time it was almost mid­night, and I was dan­ger­ous­ly close to miss­ing the last Metro train at 12:30.  I packed up and head­ed back, this time mak­ing sure I crossed the boule­vard at the right place!

As I was hoof­ing it back up to Tro­cadero Plaza, I turned around and beheld a beau­ti­ful sight!  The tow­er became lit up from top to bot­tom with white lights, which then start­ed sparkling in a ran­dom pat­tern.   This can only be prop­er­ly cap­tured on video, but I did man­age to set up again and get off a few shots.

Being even more fear­ful of miss­ing tha last train, I packed up my gear again and made a bee­line to the Metro sta­tion.  Then it was back to my apart­ment to process my pho­tos and upload the best to Flickr.

Tomor­row I will endeav­or to take some aer­i­al shots!