Aamir Zakaria Photography

On day 8 of my Paris pho­tog­ra­phy adven­ture, I decid­ed to take some pic­tures of the Notre Dame cathe­dral, as well as some close­up views of the (near) full moon by the Eif­fel Tow­er. I was espe­cial­ly inter­est­ed in pho­tograph­ing the gar­goyles on the roof of Notre Dame, but I found out that roof access closed at 5 pm.  I will try again tomorrow.

There was a long line, but it moved quite quick­ly.   There are a num­ber of inter­est­ing stat­ues on the front of the build­ing, of which this one caught my atten­tion: What hap­pened to this per­son­’s head?

There was a ser­vice in progress inside.  Tripods (and hats) are not allowed in the cathe­dral, so I had to shoot at ISO 3200.  This was def­i­nite­ly a sit­u­a­tion where hav­ing a high-end cam­era helped me.   I am once again impressed at how lit­tle noise I am see­ing on the images from my Canon 5D Mk III at high ISOs. 

There were lots of can­dles inside, and these were what real­ly caught my eye.

Prayers were being offered for loved ones. 

After leav­ing, I head­ed over to the Eif­fel Tow­er again, this time tak­ing the 3 mile walk­ing route instead of the Metro.  I cap­tured a few scenes along the way.

This next fel­low was hilar­i­ous.  It seemed like he was float­ing in midair.  It took me a while to fig­ure out how he was doing it.

There was a jazz musi­cian play­ing with some tap dancers in front of Shake­speare & Com­pa­ny.  If you’re look­ing for an Eng­lish book­store with lots of char­ac­ter, this is the place to go.   I picked up “Move­able Feast” by Ernest Hem­ing­way as  “Amer­i­can in Paris” read­ing, if I ever get around to it.

The Pont des Arts bridge is lined with locks.  I don’t know the sto­ry behind this, if any, but it made for some good imagery, espe­cial­ly with the gold­en late after­noon glow.

I made it back to Tro­cadero Plaza, and this time I had brought my super tele­pho­to lens, a Canon 70–200 mm L.  This was an instance where hav­ing my Canon Rebel T3i came in handy.  Because the Rebel is a crop sen­sor cam­era, it effec­tive­ly adds a 1.6x mul­ti­pli­er to the focal length of any lens.  Since I want­ed the high­est focal length pos­si­ble for this par­tic­u­lar shot, hav­ing the Rebel allowed me to go up to 320 mm. I took sev­er­al images, but this one is my favorite.  I had to com­bine two dif­fer­ent expo­sures in Pho­to­shop to enable me to bring out some of the detail on the moon’s sur­face.  Oth­er­wise, at this time of evening, the moon shows up as a bright white disc if the rest of your image is prop­er­ly exposed.  You can see this on the sub­se­quent image.   It does­n’t seem that way with the human eye, but what is hap­pen­ing is your brain is adjust­ing the “expo­sure” of what it is see­ing based on what the eyes are focus­ing on.   I exper­i­ment­ed with this and noticed that my eye had to focus either on the moon or the Eif­fel Tow­er, but not both at the same time.   The brain puts all that infor­ma­tion togeth­er auto­mat­i­cal­ly.  The pho­tog­ra­ph­er has to use Pho­to­shop. As I head­ed back to Tro­cadero Plaza, the tow­er was lit up with flash­ing white lights, as I’ve seen every hour on the hour in the evening.   I got the fol­low­ing shot, which is sim­i­lar to what I got the oth­er day, but since it was lat­er into dusk it had a deep­er blue sky and a brighter moon and tow­er. I also took a video of the flash­ing lights.   I’ll see if I can con­vert and trim it to a size where I can upload it here.

Ciao for now!