Aamir Zakaria Photography

It’s the final day of my Paris pho­tog­ra­phy adven­ture, and Ver­sailles is the main thing on the agenda.

I got there soon after it opened at 9 am, and the line was humon­gous (a recur­ring theme of my trip). I’m going to go out on a limb here and say, as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er at least, you can skip the Palace tour and go straight to the gar­dens. That’s where you will get the best shots, and it’s free and there are no lines to deal with. It is an absolute zoo inside the palace, they will con­fis­cate your tri­pod, and you aren’t allowed to take any pho­tographs in the spe­cial exhibitions.

I did end up going into the Palace, think­ing I had to in order to get to the gar­dens. Since I had already bought my tick­et, I shoved and plowed my way through the mass­es to see if there were any shots to be had. I got a nice ceil­ing shot with my fisheye:

And a nice shot of the roy­al chambers:

Oth­er than that, it’s just a lot of paint­ings and gaudy ornate gold dec­o­ra­tions. Take a look at the pic­tures online and save your­self the hassle. 

In an effort to find some­thing unique to shoot in the Palace, I took a pic­ture of tourists tak­ing pictures:

In fact, tourists tak­ing pic­tures became a fun theme for me:

One thing I’ll nev­er under­stand is why peo­ple take pic­tures with an iPad. The iPhone has a bet­ter cam­era, and the iPad just seems so unwieldy. Nev­er­the­less, there were iPad pho­tog­ra­phers all over the place.

Fin­ish­ing the palace tour and get­ting out to the gar­dens was lit­er­al­ly a huge breath of fresh air. There’s tons to shoot there.

There are plen­ty of sculp­tures in the gar­dens you could shoot. My favorite com­po­si­tion was to use f/4 and focus on a stat­ue and blur out the palace in the back­ground. I also used HDR to bring out more of the tex­ture in the stat­ue itself.

Because the clouds were great, some­times I used that as the only background.

For shots of the entire gar­den, I used a wide angle lens with a nar­row­er aper­ture to main­tain more front to back sharp­ness. This shot was tak­en at f/11.

The flower gar­dens are quite col­or­ful and pho­to­genic. I like a wide open aper­ture here.

And there are plen­ty of peo­ple shots. While this girl’s par­ents wait­ed in line, she was chas­ing pigeons.
She nev­er did catch one, however. 

I don’t know if this fel­low was being con­tem­pla­tive or just tak­ing a break from his parents.

I was real­ly lucky because I had a great sky. I tried to cap­ture it in some reflections.

As I was leav­ing, storm clouds were brew­ing, and I tried to bring out that fore­bod­ing look with HDR processing.

I got a lit­tle lost find­ing the train sta­tion, and end­ed up tak­ing the SNCF train at Ver­sailles Rive Droite back to Paris. That turned out to be for­tu­itous, as it was a very scenic ride, with views of La Défense, the Eif­fel Tow­er, ceme­ter­ies, graf­fi­ti, and some very inter­est­ing build­ing design. I high­ly rec­om­mend it and sit on the right side.

Dur­ing that ride, I noticed a view along the riv­er Seine down to La Défense. I’d been want­i­ng to take some night shots of those build­ings, so I dropped a pin for ref­er­ence on my iPhone map and then fig­ured out how to get back there lat­er using the RATP app. That pin drop tech­nique is very use­ful in this kind of situation.

I end­ed up in a love­ly neigh­bor­hood called Pont de Neuil­ly. I wan­dered around quite a bit and I didn’t get the shot I was look­ing for, but I still got a nice shot of a cou­ple of La Défense sky­scrap­ers against a beau­ti­ful blue hour sky.

I head­ed back to the Pont de Neuil­ly Metro sta­tion and found myself at a spot look­ing at the Grande Arche in one direc­tion and the Arc de Tri­om­phe in anoth­er. That’s the Ave Charles de Gaulle, which is basi­cal­ly the con­tin­u­a­tion of the Champs d’Élysées on the oth­er side of the Arc de Tri­om­phe. The blue cloudy sky came out nice­ly here.

I switched to my tele­pho­to lens to zoom in tighter, and before I tried to focus, I saw all of these beau­ti­ful blur­ry lights. I real­ly liked what I saw so I cap­tured it, and I’m call­ing it the “Arc de Blur.” You can bare­ly make out the Arc de Tri­om­phe in the center.

That’s an appro­pri­ate shot to end with, as these past 19 days have gone by in a blur. I hope I’ve been able to give you some use­ful infor­ma­tion for your own Paris pho­tog­ra­phy adven­ture. It’s an incred­i­bly pic­turesque city, a real photographer’s dream. And if you aren’t able to make it to Paris your­self, I hope you’ll be able to enjoy a slice of that beau­ty through my own images.

Au revoir for now!