Thursday, March 8, 2012

How Do You Solve a Problem Like the Pantheon?

How do you shoot a subject that’s been shot ad infinitum? I mean, you can take your happy snaps just to say ‘I was there’ but that just doesn’t really appeal to me although I guess I do it too. There’s also the argument that you can never have too many photos of a given subject – wouldn’t we all want to have a few more photos of the World Trade Center for example? But then again, happy snaps usually ain’t art and well isn’t that kind of the point?

Anyway, I walked past the Pantheon from this angle every day I was in Paris as I moved from my hotel to a British Pub to kill an hour or so before the Golden Hour. I think I might have made a shot every day too since I felt like I had to shoot the Pantheon (not sure why – there were plenty of Parisian landmarks I didn’t shoot) but none of them were really getting at what I wanted. Part of the problem was trying to shoot a building of this size from a limited viewpoint – it was hard to really get a good angle and do anything with it. The other problem is that I really didn’t know what I was going for which is, well, always sort of a problem or at least the start of one. Finally, my last day there I had what you see below: direct golden light on the front, nice deep blue skies and wispy clouds to keep things from getting too boring up there. Slap the polarizer on the 16mm, take a knee, and Bob’s your uncle.

Like I said, I never really did figure out what approach I wanted to take with this but felt like I had to do something and came up with this.

And that’s how you shoot the Pantheon.

Paris Sera Toujours Paris 042

No comments:

Post a Comment