Aamir Zakaria Photography

On day 9 of this Paris pho­tog­ra­phy adven­ture , I want­ed to try shoot­ing from the top of Notre Dame, as I had tried to do yes­ter­day. This time I got here an hour ear­li­er. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I wast­ed 1/2 hour in the wrong line. There are 2 lines at Notre Dame, a quick­ly mov­ing line to the entrance and an abhor­rent­ly slow-mov­ing line around the side to get to the top. This lat­ter line was mas­sive, so once again I could not com­plete my objec­tive.  I’ll get here when it opens at 10 tomorrow.
I took a few shots of Hôtel de Ville on my way back, which I stu­pid­ly thought was a big hotel.  It turns out to be city hall. What grabbed me visu­al­ly, as with so many build­ings in Paris,  was the enor­mi­ty of the build­ing.  After some failed attempts at cap­tur­ing the essence of “large­ness”, I real­ized that the best way to do this was with a panora­ma. I took 3 side-to-side shots and stitched them togeth­er. In ret­ro­spect, I could’ve also used my iPhone, which real­ly shines in this area.

The final image was­n’t par­tic­u­lar­ly remark­able.  How­ev­er, I love what I got when I fed the wrong images into my HDR machine:

Mean­while, I had a stor­age issue that cre­at­ed some mild pan­ic.   The SD slot in my Mac­Book Pro refused to rec­og­nize an SD card which had some valu­able images.
My workaround was to buy an exter­nal USB card read­er, which did the trick.

The Canon 5D Mk III has a great fea­ture that would have avoid­ed this pan­ic. You can load two mem­o­ry cards simul­ta­ne­ous­ly into the cam­era, an SD card and a CF card. You have the option of record­ing to one or the oth­er, or rolling over to the oth­er card when one becomes full. The way I use it is to write to both cards simul­ta­ne­ous­ly giv­ing me an auto­mat­ic back­up. I can­not tell you how much peace of mind this pro­vides.  I would­n’t have had the same pan­ic sce­nario if the card had come out of my 5D Mk III.  In this case the card had been in my Rebel T3i, which does not have that feature.

I take back­ing up very seri­ous­ly. At a min­i­mum, I aim to have a sec­ond copy of every image at all times, or cre­ate one as soon as prac­ti­cal.  I also use Crash­Plan Pro, one of many online stor­age sites which pro­vide off-site back­up.  This pro­vides a safe­house for my images for when the big earth­quake final­ly hits San Fran­cis­co and destroys my apart­ment and my hard drives.

In the evening, I set out for Place de la Con­corde to see if there might be some worth­while night shots and indeed there were.  You can even see the Eif­fel Tow­er in the back­ground, so my dai­ly Eif­fel Tow­er streak remains unbroken.

As I dis­cov­ered, this is also a great spot to shoot the Arc de Tri­om­phe star­ing right down the Champs-Élysées.  The street buck­les in such a way that the traf­fic lights don’t inter­fere, as they do fur­ther up the street. I may come back with my super tele­pho­to to try this again. This image is not so dif­fer­ent from the one I got ear­li­er, but it’s such a great image that I want to per­fect its capture.

Next, I tried hunt­ing down the Grand Palais near­by. I had noticed dur­ing the day­time that it had a huge glass roof, and I some­how envi­sioned all this glass being lit up at night, but alas it was not. On the way how­ev­er I got a nice shot look­ing down towards the Hôtel de Invalides. The expo­sure was tricky b/c of the oncom­ing head­lights. I real­ly could­n’t get the Hôtel exposed as bright­ly as I want­ed, because the head­lights were already blow­ing out the image (over­ex­pos­ing beyond repair). I might have tried over­ex­pos­ing even fur­ther, but it did­n’t seem prac­ti­cal. I still like the image.

At this point I head­ed back home. Once I got to my final des­ti­na­tion at the Republique stop, I decid­ed to get a shot I’d always want­ed to take in San Fran­cis­co, a long expo­sure show­ing the move­ment of a sub­way train (which in San Fran­cis­co  would be the MUNI or BART). After sev­er­al attempts, I succeeded.

Final­ly, as I was walk­ing out of the sta­tion, I saw an eye-catch­ing jux­ta­po­si­tion of a home­less man with a poster behind him.  I added some grain in Light­room to give it a more grit­ty social doc­u­men­tary look:

Tomor­row’s anoth­er day and I plan bit­ing the bul­let and tak­ing some dawn shots of the Eif­fel Tow­er, as well as a third (and hope­ful­ly final) attempt at the upper deck of Notre Dame.

Until then…