Aamir Zakaria Photography

It’s day 4 of my Paris pho­tog­ra­phy adven­ture, and it’s gloomy and cloudy — a great day to vis­it a cemetery.

Luck­i­ly, the Père Lachaise ceme­tery is only about a mile from my place, so I strapped on my cam­era and hoofed it.  I did­n’t envi­sion using the tri­pod there and I did­n’t think I’d need my tele­pho­to lens, so I just took the cam­era with a 24–105 mm lens.  I don’t par­tic­u­lar­ly like chang­ing lens­es in the field any­way, to min­i­mize the chance of get­ting dust on my sensor.

I shoot a Canon 5D Mk III, a ter­rif­ic cam­era.  I start­ed off with a Canon Rebel T3i, but as I got more seri­ous about my work, I grad­u­at­ed to the 5D Mk III.  I remem­ber feel­ing so intim­i­dat­ed when I got the Rebel, with all the menus, but­tons, and set­tings.  I’ve been pret­ty much a point-a-click shoot­er all of my life, so using a DSLR was a whole new ball­game.  Sure, you can shoot a DSLR in auto­mat­ic mode, and I sus­pect most peo­ple do just that.  Still, I left the Rebel in the box for at least a month or two before I over­came my anx­i­ety and plunged in.  I real­ly enjoyed that cam­era, and I still keep it as a back­up.  But now that I have the 5D Mk III, the Rebel looks like a toy, and feels like one too. The 5D Mk III is a stur­dier cam­era with a full frame,  i.e. a big­ger sen­sor which gives it bet­ter per­for­mance in low-light con­di­tions.  This is very impor­tant to me as a night pho­tog­ra­ph­er.  Beyond that, it has many more options with set­ting aut­o­fo­cus points, and it shoots way faster in high-speed con­tin­u­ous mode, which is key when try­ing to cap­ture action shots or when shoot­ing brack­et­ed expo­sures for HDR.  I’ve added a bat­tery pack, which is absolute­ly essen­tial for those long night expo­sures, so it’s a pret­ty hefty chunk of cam­era.  Today, it was a nice relief to give my shoul­ders a break by leav­ing the rest of the gear home.

As I walked through the ceme­tery gates, I was instant­ly awed by the enor­mi­ty of the ceme­tery.  In fact, they actu­al­ly have a map to help you nav­i­gate it (and which I lat­er wished I’d tak­en), and there is a whole sys­tem of streets (look for street signs in pho­tos below).  Believe it or not, there are over a mil­lion peo­ple buried here!

This is anoth­er exam­ple of a sit­u­a­tion which is very hard to cap­ture on film (even though I use a dig­i­tal cam­era, I’m so used to the term “film” that I con­tin­ue to use it).  It’s sort of like try­ing to take a pic­ture of a for­est but only being able to show a few trees.

These graves and tombs are just PACKED togeth­er, with only inch­es sep­a­rat­ing them, and they are con­struct­ed in such a huge vari­ety.  It’s the total oppo­site of Arling­ton Nation­al Ceme­tery, which is also quite pic­turesque, where all the tens of thou­sands of graves are marked identically.

I was struck by how old the place seemed.  In fact, it is pret­ty old.   The grounds were pur­chased in 1430 by a rich mer­chant for his home, but was even­tu­al­ly aban­doned over the sub­se­quent cen­turies and sold off by his descen­dants.  The ceme­tery actu­al­ly went into ser­vice in 1804, with only 13 graves.  Read more details in the Wikipedia arti­cle here.

There are many famous lumi­nar­ies buried here includ­ing Fred­er­ic Chopin and Oscar Wilde, but per­haps the most famous celebri­ty is Jim Mor­ri­son, for­mer singer for the Doors.   Find­ing Jim’s grave was as good a goal as any, with a round­about route to look for good pic­ture opportunities.

Pic­tures are worth a thou­sand words, so see the ensu­ing pho­tographs, but some of the promi­nent things that caught my eye were: stat­ues express­ing life, death, and grief; flow­ers — old, new, fake, and fresh; signs of decay — rust, bro­ken down doors, cob­webs, drip­ping cop­per stains, bro­ken off con­crete; lots of moss; a few for­eign graves; and a few very recent ones.  And did I men­tion the place looked old?

I was hav­ing a fas­ci­nat­ing tour of the ceme­tery, and was absolute­ly sure I was head­ing towards Jim Mor­rison’s grave, when I noticed I was at a spot I had already passed.  I pulled out my GPS and real­ized I was com­plete­ly lost.  If only I had that map.  I final­ly found a grounds­man and asked him for the 6’ième divi­sion, to which he replied “Jim Mor­ri­son?”  He then said a bunch of French which I com­plete­ly did­n’t under­stand but point­ed me in the right direc­tion.  I found two oth­er lost souls and final­ly arrived at my des­ti­na­tion.  The grave was actu­al­ly sur­round­ed by a 10 foot fence, pre­sum­ably to keep out the groupies, and it was clear­ly one of the hottest attrac­tions at the ceme­tery, despite some con­tro­ver­sy as to whether or not his body is actu­al­ly lying there.

The first image below is not his grave­stone, but some­thing cre­at­ed by one of his fans and placed near­by.  The sec­ond image shows the fence sur­round­ing the grave and some of the oth­er tourists vis­it­ing.  You will also see a lin­ing of bam­boo around a tree with even­ly spaced gum stuck onto it — go fig­ure.   The third image is the grave itself.

Hav­ing final­ly achieved my objec­tive, I head­ed back to my apart­ment and processed some photos.

I fig­ured I’d take a break from the Eif­fel Tow­er, but I went out in the evening to a total­ly unre­lat­ed activ­i­ty, and lo and behold…Le Tour Eiffel!

I just can’t seem to get away from that thing!  This image was tak­en with my iPhone (ah, a  relief to have a few hours with­out car­ry­ing my cam­era) and processed on my lap­top with Topaz Adjust’s Lomo I fil­ter, to give that old-style film look.  I con­fess, I haven’t gained any facil­i­ty with the numer­ous iPhone pho­to pro­cess­ing apps, and I’m sure one of them could have giv­en a sim­i­lar effect with the click of a button.

As far as tech­ni­cal details of my shoot today, the main issue I had to deal with was pre­vent­ing hand­hold shake.  I only sub­se­quent­ly real­ized that I had the image sta­bi­liza­tion switch off, which is a bum­mer, but oh well.  When I’m shoot­ing hand­held, I try to keep my shut­ter speed at the inverse of the focal length, or 1/60 sec as a rough approx­i­ma­tion.  Since it was cloudy, the only way to get a fast enough pic­ture and still have an ade­quate­ly exposed pic­ture was to open my aper­ture and raise my ISO.  I went back and forth between ISO 200 and 400, depend­ing on how dark it was.  I also used brack­et­ed expo­sures, because I got blown out high­lights in the sky, even though the sub­ject mat­ter was dark.  This enabled me to sub­se­quent­ly use HDR on a few images, plus, and I hate to say this, it gave me some wig­gle room when I was­n’t pay­ing as close atten­tion to my expo­sure as I should have.

The bot­tom line is:  you always pay a price when you go with­out your tri­pod.  But it sure saves your back.

I know this was a long post, but this vis­it turned out to be a much more in-depth expe­ri­ence than I ever imag­ined it would be.

Until tomor­row…