Aamir Zakaria Photography

I vis­it­ed Mont­martre on day 12 of my Paris pho­tog­ra­phy adven­ture. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, heavy down­pours and mobs of tourists pre­vent­ed me from get­ting much photographically.

I did vis­it the Sacré-cœur Basil­i­ca, and the tex­tures were amazing.

The sky was real­ly bland, and I was­n’t too crazy about my out­side shot:

But I played around with it just for grins, and with some HDR and a cou­ple of fil­ters I got this:

There’s a fine line between being artis­tic and over-the-top, and some­times it’s hard to know where to draw that line. As with any form of art, beau­ty is in the eye of the beholder.

When HDR first became the rage, I saw all kinds of over-the-top HDR images, and the nov­el­ty had an “Oh wow” effect on me.   Nowa­days, most pro­fes­sion­al pho­tog­ra­phers seem to be ton­ing down their style, pos­si­bly add some HDR to give a lit­tle pop to the image, but not so much to make it obvi­ous.  It’s like adding hot sauce to a meal — you want to enhance the fla­vor, but not over­pow­er it.

I hap­pen to like hot sauce.

“Grungy” is a term often used for over-the-top HDR pro­cess­ing, and the nov­el­ty has worn off for me.   Hav­ing said that, there’s some­thing in this par­tic­u­lar image which seems to lend itself to a bit of a grungy look.

I think sub­jects which have a lot of tex­ture, such as this one, can lend them­selves more to extreme pro­cess­ing.  How­ev­er, you’d nev­er want to do this to an image of a per­son, unless you don’t like them very much.

You do pay a price for extreme pro­cess­ing — you often intro­duce noise into the image, just like you do when you increase the ISO in your camera.

If you don’t know what “noise” is, here’s a close­up of the sky in the heav­i­ly processed image above:

In con­trast, the sky in the orig­i­nal image looks like this:

If I want some­thing to look pho­to­re­al­is­tic, I want it to look as clean and sharp as pos­si­ble.   With this last image, while I’m not crazy about the noise, I think it looks more inter­est­ing than the bland grey sky.   I’m tak­ing artis­tic license here.

Soft­ware can do some pret­ty amaz­ing things to clean up some of the noise.  Usu­al­ly I use noise reduc­tion in Light­room, and it works ter­rif­i­cal­ly.  When I have an astound­ing amount of noise, such as with this image, I used a pro­gram called Topaz Denoise.  This is what it did with that noisy seg­ment I showed you above.

It’s noth­ing like the clean image, but it’s a major improve­ment, espe­cial­ly when you aren’t zoomed in so much.

This is my final image with some of the noise tak­en out:

The Basil­i­ca itself is quite beau­ti­ful inside, but pho­tog­ra­phy is not allowed, and while I’m not always a stick­ler for rules, break­ing them inside a church did­n’t seem quite right to me.     I took this oppor­tu­ni­ty to put my cam­era away and pray and med­i­tate for a few min­utes.   And plan my next shots.

I wan­dered around the neigh­bor­hood a lit­tle bit, and I could­n’t believe how desert­ed it was just a block away from the tourist crowd.  I came up with 3 loca­tions I want to shoot, but at this point it real­ly start­ed pour­ing.  I made a bee-line to the the Metro sta­tion and put these on the dock­et for tomorrow.