Aamir Zakaria Photography

The much-antic­i­pat­ed high­light of day 17 of my Paris pho­tog­ra­phy adven­ture was the vis­it to the Cat­a­combes. I got there at 8:30 for a 10 am open­ing, and I was glad I did. By the time the Cat­a­combes opened, the line had lit­er­al­ly wrapped around the block and then some. Those who arrived late on the day before had a 4 hour wait.

I high­ly rec­om­mend the audio tour. There is so much his­to­ry to the Cat­a­combes that the nar­ra­tion will sig­nif­i­cant­ly enhance your expe­ri­ence. There are guid­ed tours as well, but as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, you will want the free­dom to explore at your own pace. 

I’m glad they only let in 200 peo­ple at a time, because it was sur­pris­ing­ly uncrowd­ed once I got inside. There was plen­ty of time to set up shots and wait for oth­ers to move out of my field of view.

A fast lens is real­ly cru­cial for this shoot because flash­es and tripods are for­bid­den inside. My aper­ture was wide open at f/1.2, but I still had to use high ISOs of 6400 and even 12,800.

The descent into the Cat­a­combes starts with a deep fore­bod­ing descent down a spi­ral stair­case, fol­lowed by long hall­ways of ancient lime­stone drip­ping with mois­ture. Be sure to bring a jack­et. Then you will enter the crypts them­selves, and it is tru­ly a sight to behold.

Seem­ing­ly end­less rows of stacks of skulls and bones extend as far as the eye can see. It is esti­mat­ed that the remains of approx­i­mate­ly 6 mil­lion bod­ies are buried here, includ­ing many who died around the time of the French Revolution.

The dim light­ing in the crypts cre­ates some inter­est­ing shad­ows. Due to the lim­it­ed depth-of-field of a wide open aper­ture, my com­po­si­tions had to be framed accord­ing­ly, such as focus­ing on one skull at an acute angle and leav­ing every­thing else blurred out.

Each skull has its unique char­ac­ter­is­tics, and some spoke to me more than oth­ers, as if I could sense some of the for­mer own­er’s personality.

For head-on com­po­si­tion with a wide open aper­ture, it is cru­cial to keep the cam­era exact­ly per­pen­dic­u­lar to the sub­ject, or else part of the image will be out of focus.

Final­ly, be care­ful with your foot­ing. Espe­cial­ly on the way out, the floor can be quite slippery.

The next thing on my agen­da was a pho­to­graph­ic quest for a dawn shot of the Sacre Coeur Basil­i­ca. I used my Helios app to try and iden­ti­fy a loca­tion where I would be able to see the sun ris­ing over the cathe­dral. The only prob­lem was that while I could iden­ti­fy a loca­tion on the map, I could­n’t be sure if the view would be obscured by trees or build­ings. The ide­al loca­tion for this par­tic­u­lar week would have been atop the Arc de Tri­om­phe, but as with the oth­er tall struc­tures in Paris, the Eif­fel Tow­er and the Mont­par­nasse Tow­er, access is closed in the ear­ly morn­ing. I end­ed up at the Mon­ceau Park, a beau­ti­ful park, where Parisians were relax­ing dur­ing their lunch hour.

I stopped off for a bite to eat myself, and snapped some shots of the Parisians’ favorite vices — wine, cig­a­rettes, cof­fee and French fries.

An unob­tru­sive way of snap­ping these shots was to sit inside and aim my cam­era through the win­dow at unsus­pect­ing sub­jects outside. 

I even­tu­al­ly went up to the Sacre Coeur Basil­i­ca itself to see if I could find the line-of-sight loca­tion I was look­ing for. The only loca­tion I could find were in the hills on the out­skirts of Paris. I decid­ed to leave that shot for anoth­er trip, but I did get a few more shots at Mon­martre. Car­i­ca­ture artists were in full swing.

Unlike the Sacre Coeur Basil­i­ca, pho­tog­ra­phy is allowed in the adja­cent Church of St Pierre de Mont­martre, and there are some excel­lent pho­to­graph­ic sub­jects here. I am always attract­ed to light sources, and there are some beau­ti­ful can­dle arrange­ments here.

There are a num­ber of stat­ues, includ­ing one of St. Denis, the head­less cler­gy­man I had spot­ted in front of Notre Dame over a week ago. Denis was the Bish­op of Paris in the 3rd cen­tu­ry who was mar­tyred dur­ing the Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion of that time. As leg­end would have it, he picked his head up after being decap­i­tat­ed and sub­se­quent­ly walked six miles, preach­ing the entire way!

There are also some beau­ti­ful stained glass win­dows. I posi­tioned myself so the sun was shin­ing like a halo above this angel’s head. If you’re ever going to try a stunt like this, be sure to use the direct view fea­ture on the back of the cam­era. You can cause some seri­ous blind­ness star­ing direct­ly at the sun through your viewfind­er, which won’t help your pho­tog­ra­phy career.

I have only 2 days left in Paris, and tomor­row I will explore downtown.