Aamir Zakaria Photography

On day 6 of my Paris Pho­tog­ra­phy adven­ture, I thought I’d do some­thing rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent:  shoot the Eif­fel Tower!

It’s hard to believe I’ve been in Paris almost a week with the express pur­pose of get­ting a vari­ety of shots of the Eif­fel Tow­er, and I still haven’t been down to the tow­er itself. Today I was spry enough to get up ear­ly, so I head­ed down to the tow­er via Tro­cadero Plaza.

The day was gray with steadi­ly increas­ing light rain.  I had more and more trou­ble towards the end of my shoot keep­ing my lens dry, espe­cial­ly since I had my lens point­ed up towards the sky most of the time.  As I’m find­ing out, it rains a lot in Paris.

Here’s a shot as I approached the bridge cross­ing the Riv­er Seine towards the tow­er: And here’s one from when I was actu­al­ly on the bridge, processed two dif­fer­ent ways:             As you can see, the tip of the tow­er is shroud­ed in fog, which I found inter­est­ing.  The sky looked pret­ty unin­ter­est­ing at the time, but I was real­ly pleased how HDR brought out a lot of the details in the clouds and fog.

You’ve prob­a­bly noticed by now that I use HDR a lot.  For those of you new to pho­tog­ra­phy, HDR stands for High Dynam­ic Range.   Dynam­ic range is the breadth in data from light­est to dark­est.   If an entire image is at a rel­a­tive­ly same lev­el of bright­ness through­out, then it has rel­a­tive­ly low dynam­ic range.  By con­trast (no pun intend­ed), if there are very bright areas and very dark areas in an image, that image has high dynam­ic range. If you aren’t famil­iar with the graphs you see on the screen of your cam­era, those are called his­tograms.  Here’s of one of the images I took to make the above shots, as well as it’s histogram.

The impor­tant thing to notice on this his­togram is that it goes from the left side of the graph almost all the way to the right.  This would be con­sid­ered a “well-exposed” pic­ture, because we’ve cap­tured almost as much infor­ma­tion as the cam­era could pos­si­bly cap­ture.   How­ev­er, on the left side of the his­togram, you see that the line goes all the way to the left.  This implies that we are still miss­ing some infor­ma­tion from the dark­est por­tion of the image.  In this case, this would be the dark areas under the bridge.  While soft­ware pro­cess­ing is amaz­ing, there is absolute­ly no infor­ma­tion on this dig­i­tal file about what is under that bridge, and there is noth­ing the com­put­er can do to recov­er it.

The way around this prob­lem is to use brack­et­ed expo­sures.  This means that you take one nor­mal­ly exposed pic­ture and “brack­et” it with one under­ex­posed and one over­ex­posed image.  There is a set­ting on my 5D MkI­II which lets me do that auto­mat­i­cal­ly.  In this instance, if I want­ed to cap­ture more detail under the bridge, I could take a pic­ture that is “over exposed” for every­thing else.  That would shift the his­togram to the right and show me more infor­ma­tion that is “hid­den.”  HDR then lets you com­bine all of that extra infor­ma­tion into one image.   There are sev­er­al third-par­ty soft­ware pro­grams which help you do this, and you can also do it in Pho­to­shop either auto­mat­i­cal­ly or by hand using lay­ers (so-called “hand HDR”).  My tool of choice here is HDR Efex 2.  It has sev­er­al use­ful pre­sets, of which there were 5 that I used exclu­sive­ly, but now that I’ve learned the pro­gram bet­ter, I cus­tomize the look myself using the mul­ti­ple con­trols available.

Here was my next shot as I approached the tow­er clos­er, again processed with HDR:

I’d love to know the sto­ry behind that wail­ing face!  And again, I love how the tip is shroud­ed in fog.

Final­ly, I got to the tow­er itself for the clas­sic shot:

I did­n’t have to wor­ry about my gear get­ting stolen with these guys wan­der­ing around:

Here’s a close­up of the tow­er structure:

Then I switched over to my fish­eye lens for a cou­ple more shots.  It was start­ing to rain more at this point, so it was tricky wip­ing off and cov­er­ing my lens between shots.

I took anoth­er fish­eye image which I was extreme­ly hap­py with at the time, but when I came home to process it, the water drops real­ly marred the image.  I’m going to have to go back to retake this on a dry day… if I can ever find one!  The entire next week looks rainy.

I would have wan­dered around more, but the rain was becom­ing an issue.  I had had a pro­duc­tive shoot any­way, so I fig­ured it was time to head home.

I can only think of 3 or 4 more shots of the Eif­fel Tow­er I want to take, includ­ing that retake from today.  I’m going to have to wake up at 5 am for one of these, which I’m not look­ing for­ward to.   We’ll put that one on the back burn­er for now.

I’m going to sleep in tomor­row and play it by ear.  Until then…