Aamir Zakaria Photography

It’s now day 7 of my Paris Pho­tog­ra­phy adven­ture, and so far it’s been very pro­duc­tive.   At the same time, it’s nice not to feel rushed.  It’s just so beau­ti­ful in Paris, and there’s so much left to pho­to­graph.  I already feel like I will be back for at least one more trip at some point.

I did­n’t get out of the apart­ment until late, and it was still bug­ging me that I had not got­ten than one Eif­fel Tow­er shot yes­ter­day, so my prime objec­tive was to give that anoth­er go, and then maybe wan­der over to the Lou­vre.  Since it was already going to be past sun­set by the time I got there, I left my super tele­pho­to lens at home, since I’ve nev­er had good results with it in the dark.

Big mis­take.

I arrived at Tro­cadero Plaza and noticed it was packed, and then I beheld full moon ris­ing right behind the Eif­fel Tower!

I was curs­ing myself for ignor­ing my own pre­vi­ous advice and not bring­ing my longer lens so I could zoom in clos­er to the moon.  Nev­er­the­less, I made the best of the gear I did have, which was my 24–105 mm work­horse lens as well as my 8–15 mm fisheye.

The moon looked so small on the lit­tle cam­era screen and I was real­ly dis­ap­point­ed, but once I got home and processed the images, I was much hap­pi­er with the result:

The shot I was intend­ing to get was right under­neath the Eif­fel Tow­er look­ing straight up, and I was not dis­ap­point­ed this time.  I took sev­er­al shots with both of my lens­es.  The first one is with my fish­eye and the sec­ond one is with my stan­dard zoom:

Good stuff.

There were quite a few peo­ple hang­ing out on the Parc du Champ de Mars near­by, so I head­ed over there to check the action and take a cou­ple of shots.  The first one reminds me of a snow globe:

I’m not sure if it was the full moon or the Sat­ur­day night that brought so many out, but peo­ple seemed to be hav­ing a good time.

I then decid­ed to head over to the Lou­vre to get some night shots, so I caught the num­ber 69 bus near­by.  And I missed my stop.  Oh well.

I got off as soon as I could and start­ed back in the oth­er direc­tion, walk­ing along the Seine by the Île de la Cité.  As soon as I start­ed walk­ing, I noticed some beau­ti­ful reflec­tions on the Seine next to the Concierg­erie, with the Pont Neuf bridge in the back­ground.  I took a shot there and anoth­er at Pont Neuf:

I final­ly made it to the Lou­vre, and had quite a field day there:

All of a sud­den out of nowhere, this guy starts twirling a flam­ing torch, which made for some inter­est­ing shots.  My first expo­sure was 2.5 sec­onds at f/16 and ISO 1600, and showed some fun light trails from the flame, includ­ing the tail end of the flame being thrown high up in the air:

I’m sur­prised how clean the image came out is at ISO 1600.  I gen­er­al­ly try to use as low an ISO as pos­si­ble to min­i­mize noise, and I did­n’t even use any noise reduc­tion dur­ing post-pro­cess­ing.  I cranked up the ISO because I did­n’t want to have to wait around for a 30 sec­ond expo­sure.  By then, he might have tak­en off somewhere.

I also then attempt­ed to cap­ture the flame itself, so I adjust­ed my set­ting to a quick­er shut­ter speed of 1/15 of a sec­ond and opened up my aper­ture to f/4:

I then noticed the moon peek­ing behind a cloud in one of my shots:

I loved the effect I was get­ting here with a shut­ter speed of 25 sec­onds, so I recom­posed and got a cou­ple of oth­er nice shots with the moon:

Final­ly, I moved in for a close­up of the metal­lic struc­ture inside the Lou­vre pyramid.

Pret­ty trippy!

The near­est Metro sta­tion to catch my train was at Con­corde, so on my way I walked by the Jardin des Tui­leries, an out­door fair in the cen­ter of the city.  I got some nice motion shots there:

It was close to 1 am and I was starv­ing, so I stopped in for a choco­late and banana crèpe and a diet Coke, and got a motion shot of this carousel in between bites:

As I was on the home­stretch, I got the oblig­a­tory light trail shot on Rue de Rivoli:

I had a brief moment of pan­ic when I got to the Metro sta­tion, fear­ing that the trains had stopped run­ning for the evening.   Luck­i­ly they hadn’t.

This turned out to be a much more pro­duc­tive day than I was expect­ing.  I had set out to obtain just that one shot of the Eif­fel Tow­er, and I end­ed up with quite a bit of qual­i­ty material.

I think tomor­row it’s back to Eif­fel Tow­er yet again.  The moon won’t be quite full, but there’s still 98% of moon­light on the days before and after the full moon, which I’m think­ing will be close enough for my purposes.

Until then…