Aamir Zakaria Photography

It’s day 11 of my Paris pho­tog­ra­phy adven­ture, and although I did­n’t make it to Mont­martre, I did snap a few shots near the Opera house.    The street lay­out in Paris is unique in that there are many cen­tral hubs from which roads radi­ate.   It’s impres­sive to see but hard to cap­ture on film.  I used my iPhone to get this panora­ma, and you can see all 6 of the radi­at­ing roads in one image.

You can see in the upper right hand cor­ner how the fad­ing sun­set was just catch­ing the top of two of the buildings.

I did­n’t like how dark the low­er part of this pic­ture was, so I used a grad­u­at­ed fil­ter in Light­room to light­en it up.

I use grad­u­at­ed fil­ters a lot.  They are quick and easy ways to selec­tive­ly light­en or dark­en from the edges.  You can also use these fil­ters to grad­u­al­ly adjust oth­er para­me­ters such as con­trast, sat­u­ra­tion, etc.

You can also see how I cropped out the bot­tom por­tion of the image to focus more atten­tion on the build­ings.  The side­walk and the entrance to the Metro were doing noth­ing for this image.  How­ev­er, I still want­ed to leave some of it show­ing to pro­vide a point of ref­er­ence.  Crop­ping is anoth­er pow­er­ful tool.  The most impor­tant aspect of pho­tog­ra­phy is com­po­si­tion, and crop­ping lets you opti­mize that in post-processing.

Final­ly, I added some HDR to give it a lit­tle more punch.

HDR works best when you have 3 RAW files tak­en with dif­fer­ent expo­sures, but you can use HDR even with 1 JPEG file.  I shoot exclu­sive­ly in RAW on my DSLR, but the iPhone only cap­tures JPEG.  The advan­tage of JPEG is it uses less mem­o­ry, but the dis­ad­van­tage is that your cam­era is throw­ing valu­able infor­ma­tion.  The cam­era cap­tures 12 bits of infor­ma­tion, but a JPEG file only keeps 8.  When you set your cam­era to shoot in JPEG, the cam­era decides which 4 bits of infor­ma­tion to throw away.  If you shoot in RAW for­mat, you can make that deci­sion your­self.  This is impor­tant for HDR, where you can take full advan­tage of that extra information.

Nev­er­the­less, even with 1 JPEG image, you can use HDR by cre­at­ing two addi­tion­al copies of the file and then adjust­ing the expo­sures +1 and ‑1 EV in the com­put­er.  You can then send all three of these files to your HDR pro­gram.  You’re still miss­ing quite a bit of data, but it’s bet­ter than nothing.

Here’s the opera house itself (enhanced with HDR):

Because I had my 70–200 mm super tele­pho­to lens, I was able to zoom in close­ly to the gold­en fig­ures, which were cap­tur­ing my atten­tion due to the inter­est­ing light.

Then I cropped in once I got back home to elim­i­nate dis­tract­ing elements:

Now you can real­ly see what caught me atten­tion, the beau­ti­ful glow on this figure.

Then I noticed sim­i­lar light reflect­ing off the roof of anoth­er build­ing.   Repeat­ing pat­terns can make for nice images.

I played around with this image for quite a while to get it the way I want­ed.   I tried HDR and grad­u­at­ed fil­ters, but was­n’t sat­is­fied.  Then I turned to one of the many fil­ters in the Google/Nik Col­or Efex col­lec­tion.  They have a pre­set recipe of fil­ters called “Warm Sun­set”, and this was exact­ly what I was look­ing for.

There are so many fil­ters out there that it can be over­whelm­ing.  I’m still in the process of learn­ing which ones I like, but they can be very pow­er­ful tools when used properly.

Here’s an exam­ple of how I used fil­ters on an image I post­ed yesterday.

The orig­i­nal image looked like this:

There does­n’t seem to be any col­or in this image.  It almost looks black and white.  How­ev­er, If you turn up the sat­u­ra­tion you can bring out sub­tle col­ors that are hiding.

Isn’t that amaz­ing?  There’s some rich brown, green and pur­ple tones which weren’t ini­tial­ly vis­i­ble.  I liked the hint of pur­ple and want­ed to enhance it even fur­ther, so I put it through the Pur­ple Film recipe in Col­or Efex, which gave me the final result.   You can also see that I cropped the image slightly.

By crop­ping out part of the image I did­n’t want, I effec­tive­ly filled up the image with the parts that I did want.  It looks like I zoomed in on the gar­goyle, but that’s just an opti­cal illu­sion from cropping.

That’s it for today.  Hope­ful­ly I will make it to Mont­martre tomorrow.