Aamir Zakaria Photography

Today is day 5 of my Paris pho­tog­ra­phy adven­ture, and it’s pour­ing outside.

I have no issue shoot­ing in light rain.   How­ev­er, I draw the line at downpours.

Once the rain died down, I had an idea.  As you remem­ber, I had trou­ble get­ting a clear aer­i­al view of the Eif­fel Tow­er the oth­er day because of the haze.  Some­times a good down­pour will clean a lot of the dust par­ti­cles out of the atmos­phere, so with that in mind I head­ed out for anoth­er attempt at an aer­i­al Eif­fel Tow­er shot, this time from a dif­fer­ent loca­tion. My host Olivi­er sug­gest­ed I try the Parc de Belleville, which is less than a mile from my apart­ment, so off I went. I took my tri­pod this time.  I won’t say that I regret­ted it, but the uphill climb with the extra weight did give me a bit of a work­out (which I need­ed any­way).  I some­times get lazy and leave gear at home, only to regret it lat­er.  Hav­ing made that mis­take sev­er­al times, I now make more of a con­scious effort to take that extra piece of gear along, despite how much my lazy mind is telling me I won’t need it.

This tri­pod is heavy.

Specif­i­cal­ly for this trip, I upgrad­ed from a Man­frot­to tri­pod with a Man­frot­to head to a Git­zo tri­pod with a Real­ly Right Stuff head.   For those of you who are seri­ous about pho­tog­ra­phy, you know how frus­trat­ing it can be keep dis­cov­er­ing there’s yet anoth­er piece of expen­sive gear you need.   Why upgrade a tri­pod when I already have an excel­lent (and lighter) set­up?  For 3 rea­sons.  First of all, a tri­pod that is too stur­dy.  Liv­ing in windy San Fran­cis­co, I have had many sit­u­a­tions where the wind was notice­ably affect­ing the sta­bil­i­ty of my tri­pod.  Sec­ond­ly, I have had sit­u­a­tions where I could not extend my tri­pod as high as I want­ed to, and this Git­zo has an extra set of exten­sions for that pur­pose (and which real­ly paid off).  And final­ly, more relat­ed to the head than the tri­pod, I found that the Man­frot­to head could­n’t han­dle the weight of my heavy lens­es (such as my 70–200 mm) when it’s cocked at an odd angle.  The cam­era keeps creep­ing no mat­ter how hard I try to tight­en it.

Despite the extra weight and expense, I’ve nev­er regret­ted this pur­chase.  I still take the Man­frot­to if I want to trav­el light and if I’m not bring­ing any big lens­es along.  But for this trip, it’s the Gitzo.

So here I am huff­ing and puff­ing up the hill to Parc de Belleville, pass­ing all these Chi­nese restau­rants and butch­ers, and I get up there and, well, it’s actu­al­ly even hazier than it was at Mont­par­nasse Tow­er.  Bum­mer.  How­ev­er, this is a good exam­ple of what post-pro­cess­ing can do to an oth­er­wise bland pho­to­graph.  Here’s the orig­i­nal shot:

Pret­ty crap­py, if you ask me.  The com­po­si­tion is ok, although there’s no need to show so much of the tree on the bot­tom and the right.  But the biggest prob­lem is the col­ors are just so flat.  The whole image is flat.  There is no pop to it.

Here’s how I got it to look with post-pro­cess­ing HDR:

Ta da!  Much improved.

So I head­ed back to my apart­ment to plan my next move.

What I need­ed was good light.  Pho­tog­ra­phy is all about light.  Pho­tog­ra­phy seems to be about imag­ing objects, but what its real­ly about imag­ing the light that is reflect­ing off of those objects.    If the light sucks, your pho­tographs will suck.

That’s one rea­son I like night pho­tog­ra­phy so much.  You have a much more pre­dictable light­ing sit­u­a­tion, because the light sources are sta­ble.  You don’t have to wor­ry if the sun is at the right angle or if there are too many clouds.

With that in mind, I decid­ed to wait until the evening and head down to the Champs-Élysées to shoot the Arc de Tri­om­phe.  It seemed like a prime sub­ject for night photography.

I left my tele­pho­to lens at home, which light­ened the load sig­nif­i­cant­ly.  For what­ev­er rea­son, I’ve nev­er been able to get sharp pic­tures at very high focal lengths at night.

I went to the Metro sta­tion to wait for the 9 from Republique to Franklin D. Roo­sevelt.  Was­n’t FDR an Amer­i­can pres­i­dent?  Why the heck do they have this amaz­ing Metro sta­tion named after him?

And what’s up with all the con­dom machines?  I swear, every­where I turn in Paris there’s a con­dom machine.  I mean, I’ve seen them in men’s rooms, but on every sub­way platform?

They even have them out on the sidewalks!

Parisiens are either very delib­er­ate about pre­vent­ing STDs or they are hav­ing a lot of sex, or pos­si­bly both.  But I digress…

As I men­tioned ear­li­er, the only pho­tog­ra­phy book I could find about Paris was writ­ten by Albert Mold­vay and Eri­ka Fabi­an in 1980.

Albert Mold­vay was staff pho­tog­ra­ph­er for Nation­al Geo­graph­ic mag­a­zine for over 13 years.   This book was the inspi­ra­tion for this trip, and hope­ful­ly a forth­com­ing book, main­ly because this is the only book out there about pho­tograph­ing Paris, and it was writ­ten so long ago in 1980, before the age of dig­i­tal photography.

Since I was head­ed down to the Arc de Tri­om­phe, I want­ed to see what Albert’s sug­ges­tions were.  He said that you can get a good shot from “cross­walks all along the Champs-Élysées.”  Well, I don’t think they had traf­fic lights in 1980, because I walked from the FDR Metro stop all the way up to the George V stop, and there were traf­fic lights mar­ring any poten­tial shots all the way up.   I final­ly made it to the cross­walk just at the George V Metro stop, and here is my tip to you bud­ding Arc de Tri­om­phe pho­tog­ra­phers:  Go to this cross­walk.  Do not pass go, do not col­lect $200.  Just go to this cross­walk.  There is a per­fect spot for set­ting up your tri­pod right in the mid­dle of the street with­out get­ting run over.  (There’s a sim­i­lar spot in San Fran­cis­co for imag­ing the Transamer­i­ca Pyra­mid which you can ask me about some time.)

All of which leads me up to this:

Once again, I used f/22 to get this beau­ti­ful star­burst pat­tern I love.  For some rea­son, I want­ed to see how it would look with a wide open aper­ture, so I tried f/4 and this is what I got instead:

I lost the star­bursts and light trails here, but now I could use a faster shut­ter speed.   That’s why you can now see blurred images of the cars them­selves instead of just the trail of their lights.  Its real­ly cool how this gives the impres­sion of speed.

It’s hard to describe the feel­ing when I get shots like this.  I get a shiv­er down my spine and a warm feel­ing in my chest.  It’s shots like these that make me do what I do.  I have cap­tured a moment of total beau­ty that will last forever.

Typ­i­cal­ly after get­ting some great shots like this, I call it quits.   I feel like it’s going to be hard to top and I don’t want to feel greedy for more.

Nev­er­the­less, the blue hour was still at hand, and I decid­ed to ven­ture to the Arc de Tri­om­phe itself to see if any­thing else was to be had.  I had brought my fish­eye lens along, and was curi­ous if I could get a shot out of it.

There is this huge road­way encir­cling it. I could­n’t see a cross­walk. For a moment, I con­sid­ered mak­ing a mad dash across 4 lanes of traf­fic. I’ve done some pret­ty crazy things before to get a great shot. Luck­i­ly, my life was spared by dis­cov­er­ing a stair­way that went under­neath it.  Unfor­tu­nate­ly, once I got down there, I saw this mas­sive line to get in. Well, there was absolute­ly no way I was going to stand in that line in that hot and humid tunnel.

Instead, I found anoth­er stair­way fur­ther down that said “Do Not Enter” and took that up.  Although it did­n’t go to the exact cen­ter, it was close enough. In fact, I prob­a­bly end­ed up get­ting an even bet­ter shot than I was ini­tial­ly intending:

Last­ly, I did cap­ture one more image of the Eif­fel Tow­er before head­ing home.

À bien­tôt!