Aamir Zakaria Photography

On day 10 of my Paris pho­tog­ra­phy adven­ture, I start­ed off by get­ting some dif­fer­ent shots of the Eif­fel Tow­er at dawn.

The whole city has such a dif­fer­ent mood in the ear­ly morn­ing.  Most of the beau­ti­ful lights I’ve been enjoy­ing at night were off.  In fact, I could bare­ly make out the Eif­fel Tow­er at all!

This first shot required an absence of peo­ple, so dawn was the only time I thought I’d be able to achieve that.  How­ev­er, once I set up for the shot, I decid­ed it would be more inter­est­ing if there were at least one or two peo­ple in the shot,  so I wait­ed until a cou­ple of jog­gers were approach­ing, and took this one.

I love how the ris­ing sun gave warm orange glow on the tow­er and the clouds.

I also did the park’s ser­vice a favor and removed all the trash for them, as you can see below.

I did this using the Pho­to­shop clone stamp, since they were a dis­trac­tion in my image.

On my way to my next two shots, the warm orange glow on the Eif­fel Tow­er caught my eye again, so I cap­tured it.  Most pho­tog­ra­phers pre­fer to shoot near sun­rise and sun­set, as this is when the light is most interesting.

I was hus­tling to get to Tro­cadero Plaza for a shot of sil­hou­ettes against the ris­ing sun, but the sun was at the wrong angle, so I’ll have to save that one for anoth­er season.

There were two oth­er pro­fes­sion­al pho­tog­ra­phers there tak­ing shots of mat­ri­mo­ni­al cou­ples, so I uti­lized one of these cou­ples as mod­els for a shot of my own.  I had only planned on tak­ing this shot with the stat­ues, but once again, I think hav­ing peo­ple in the shot gave it more feeling.

I once again used Pho­to­shop to elim­i­nate some inno­cent bystanders.

After wait­ing a few hours, I head­ed over to Notre Dame again.  This time, I got there a few min­utes before it opened at 10, and I was once again greet­ed by an enor­mous line.  At least this time I knew I’d get inside, but it was an hour and a half before I actu­al­ly did.

It was def­i­nite­ly worth the wait.   Besides a panoram­ic view of  Paris, the objects of most inter­est were the gar­goyles, of var­i­ous shapes, sizes, and visages.

There’s also a stat­ue of a promi­nent eccle­si­as­ti­cal fig­ure at the top of a spire.

One thing in par­tic­u­lar I like about HDR is how it can bring out the detail in clouds.  Like­wise, the grit­ty tex­ture you see in the gar­goyle images is a result of HDR processing.

Tomor­row, I will take a vis­it to Montmartre.