Aamir Zakaria Photography

On day 13 of my Paris pho­tog­ra­phy adven­ture, I head­ed back to the Eif­fel Tow­er for a few more shots. Of all of the Eif­fel Tow­er shots I’ve tak­en so far, this one was going to require the most foot­work, as I had absolute­ly no idea where to take it. There’s a pic­ture of the Bea­t­les I’ve seen with Paris build­ings in the fore­ground and the Eif­fel Tow­er tow­er­ing in the back­ground, and I liked the com­po­si­tion so much that I want­ed to dupli­cate it. As I looked on the map, I could only come up with a few places where I thought it could have been tak­en, but they weren’t very close to each oth­er. Seek­ing out this shot epit­o­mizes the pho­to­graph­ic adven­ture to me: using a map, my eyes, and my feet to track down a spot that match­es a men­tal image.

Today, I had brought a sol­id neu­tral den­si­ty fil­ter along, and I thought it would be fun to play with it. A neu­tral den­si­ty fil­ter blocks out light. Why, you may ask, would you pos­si­bly want to block out light? The rea­son to do that is it allows you to per­form long expo­sures on a bright day. This can allow you to cre­ate some inter­est­ing images when there are scat­tered clouds float­ing by.

You get a streaky look to the clouds which I enjoy cap­tur­ing. Here are two shots I got using this technique.

These were tak­en at f/22, ISO 50, and 30 sec­onds with a 9‑stop Hoya ND 400 fil­ter. A “stop” is the equiv­a­lent of dou­ble (or half) the expo­sure, so a 9 stop fil­ter reduces the expo­sure by 2 to the 9th pow­er. That’s a lot! I have a 10-stop B+W ND 110 fil­ter which I like even bet­ter, but I did­n’t have it with me on this trip. “Neu­tral den­si­ty” just means that it is sol­id grey, i.e. it will not affect the col­or of the image. “Sol­id” means the fil­ter reduces the amount of light even­ly across the image. You can also buy “grad­u­at­ed” neu­tral den­si­ty fil­ters, which grad­u­al­ly reduce the amount of light blocked from one side of the fil­ter to the oth­er. This kind of fil­ter is use­ful for land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy if you have a bright sky and you want to reduce the expo­sure of the sky with­out reduc­ing the expo­sure of the land­scape. I don’t use mine any more because it’s easy to repli­cate that effect in software.

I tracked down a spot which at least seemed sim­i­lar to that Bea­t­les shot in mind, and got this shot:

The light­ing is much dif­fer­ent from the Bea­t­les pho­to, plus the Bea­t­les weren’t avail­able for my shoot.

Then it was back to Mont­martre. Luck­i­ly for me, the weath­er was much nicer, plus I had a bet­ter idea of what I want­ed to shoot.

I’ve had to do a lot of climb­ing dur­ing this adven­ture, and get­ting to the top of Mont­martre was no joke, espe­cial­ly with my heavy bag of gear. Just get­ting out of the Abbesse Metro sta­tion involved climb­ing the equiv­a­lent of sev­er­al flights of stairs.

You may see the fol­low­ing pic­ture in many tour books, and in case you want to cap­ture it, it is tak­en just out­side the Abbesse Metro station:

As soon as you get up to the sur­face, very near­by is a park with the “Love Wall.”  The words “I love you” are inscribed here in a bazil­lion dif­fer­ent languages.

And what luck — I cap­tured a bridal cou­ple dur­ing their pho­to shoot. I real­ly love this picture:

There’s a tram near­by which will take you up the hill, but I chose to get some exer­cise.  There are a num­ber of cafés, restau­rants, and art gal­leries at the Place du Tertre which also serve as good pho­to­graph­ic subjects.

The Sacré-cœur Basil­i­ca is just a block away, and I had planned my vis­it for the “gold­en hour” just before sun­set.  I was­n’t dis­ap­point­ed.   The light was just mag­nif­i­cent, a huge con­trast to the day before.

And here’s a tip: walk around to the back for some more excel­lent views.

There’s a spot near­by on the cor­ner of Rue Saint-Eleuthere and Rue Aza­ïs which is a favorite amongst pho­tog­ra­phers for cap­tur­ing the sun set­ting behind the Eif­fel Tow­er.   Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the sun was­n’t in the right posi­tion this time of year, but if this is some­thing you’re inter­est­ed in, there are apps avail­able such as  “Sun Seek­er” and “Helios” which help you deter­mine when to vis­it Paris to get that shot. The spot looks like this:

You might polite­ly ask them to take down that anten­na when you go.

It’s a 15 minute walk from there to Moulin Rouge, and I timed it to get this 30 sec­ond expo­sure at the blue hour.

Final­ly, I head­ed back to Mont­martre to get a shot of some lanterns and stairs.

Tomor­row I’m going to take a night bus tour to see if I’ve missed any­thing, and if I have time there’s anoth­er Eif­fel Tow­er shot I might try.