And the Glory of the Lord Shall be Revealed

I was exhausted. I had just flown into Paris on the red eye flight and just wanted to go to my hotel to catch a couple of hours of sleep before heading out into the city. I had even let the hotel - a small boutique hotel in the 5eme -  know on my reservation form that I'd be checking in early. But upon my arrival to the front desk...

"Desole monsieur, but check in is at 1300."

"But I said that I'd be arriving early. See, it even says it on my confirmation."

"Mais monsieur, check in is at 1300"

There was nothing more to be done other than to head to a nearby cafe and suck down a enough cafe to try to remain conscious. That worked well for a while, but even I can only drink coffee for so long and besides, the morning rush was winding down, making the people watching less interesting by the momment. My maps indicated that there were several churches nearby and, with not much else to do, I figured I'd go exploring.

Whereupon entering one of (the?) oldest churches in Paris, I was greeted by the silence that comes from visiting at 0900 on Friday and nearly blinded by the early morning light streaming in from above the altar. I worked the scene with multiple cameras, trying to capture the majesty of the moment, but presently the light began to change, telling me it was time to move on.

The real fun came during editing time though. Getting the shot is usually half of the problem, but in this case, whatever challenges I faced at the scene, paled in comparison in trying to bring it all out through the editing process. I went through fully three versions of this photo (about six hours of work - easily a record for me) before finally managing to balance the blinding sunlight with the subdued foreground.

I'm still not sure if I fully achieved that balance but, as these classic cathedrals were deliberately made with imperfections, perhaps thats reflected in the photo as well.

Merry Christmas.

Vive La France!

Yeah, yeah - I've done postings with these photos before. Sue me - they're appropriate for the day.




Anyway, Happy Birthday France. I should be back with some new stuff next week.

On the Boulevard St. Germain

What's that? I've already posted this shot before you say? Et alors? By the time you see this post I'll be back in Paris, occasionally breaking up my tour of the city's cafes by taking a few photos. At any rate, this photo is worth posting again - in fact, if forced to choose, this may well be my favorite of my Paris photos. For now.

Isn't It Pretty To Think So?

While in Paris, I carried two guidebooks: The Lonely Planet Guide to Paris and The Sun Also Rises. When it came to trying to figure out where to eat at night, I’d open to section one and see where Hemmingway was going eighty some years ago and then go there – interestingly, I think every café he mentions is still open. While I didn’t have a bad meal (or drink) at any of them, La Rotonde stood out. After enjoying a pleasant Parisian Spring evening sitting on the Boulevard Montparnasse with a Cote du Rhone and an amazing entrecote, I gathered up my gear to go do some night shooting. As I started to cross the street, I took one look back at the café and saw, well, what you see above. Seemed like a pretty good example of a Parisian Café at night so I set up my gear and spent a few minutes ripping off some HDR brackets. I’ve spoken before about trying to incorporate the idea of The Forms into my photography but I won’t go so far as to say that this particular image was trying to capture the Form of a Parisian café. Honestly, I really just had a great meal.

Les Femmes Sont Très Jolies

“Is this woman ever going to move? She’s got to see me here – I’ve been kneeling like this for like five minutes with my camera. How does she not see me? Is she just being rude? That’s gotta be it – she’s Parisian, I’m a tourist, gotta be that. Seriously lady, just move already.”

Finally, I could take it no more.

“Pardon madame” I said as I nodded to my camera. She looked genuinely surprised and her eyes got just a little wider when she saw my camera and realized she’d been blocking my shot. “Desole monsieur” she said as she quickly sidestepped out of the fame. I ripped off a couple of HDR brackets, chimped, stood up and with a smile: “Merci beaucoup madame”. “Je vous en pris monsuier” with a smile of her own. I walked away.

So that was how my encounter with une femme d’un age certain ended in Paris, but it’s not how it began.

While in Paris, I knew that I’d be shooting all the famous landmarks. I didn’t know that if I’d be able to make any original images of them going in (though in retrospect, I think I did) but you have to shoot those things, so why not? But I didn’t want to stop there – I wanted to find a way to create something unusual, something less photographed and ideally, something that spoke to Parisian history. And all this without ever having set foot in the city.

Online research led me to discover the passages however – old, indoor arcades or markets, preserved and updated. Some of the photos I saw showed off wrought iron and glass so I figured that might be a good place to start. With even more luck, my maps actually had the passages indicated on them and a couple of them lined up well with one of my planned walking routes.

My initial impressions were not favorable. It was easy to see how these places would have been magnificent in decades past but years of modernization had left them as bland and soulless – albeit nice – as any other indoor mall. I honestly didn’t feel that different in them as I did in the Crystal City mall in DC to be honest. Or, at least that was case until I got to the Hotel Chopin. As soon as I saw it – more properly, the excellent period advertisements you see on the left side of the frame – I knew I’d found what I was looking for. I didn’t want to break out a tripod here, but with a fast lens and a low angle I thought I’d be able to make a good image. Fortunately, pedestrian traffic was light – I didn’t even want blurred people in my shot. It wasn’t non-existent though, and I was crouched for a while waiting for a gap in the traffic to open up. Fortunately, it was a long one since there was just this one Parisian dame who just wouldn’t get out of the way…

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.

At the Galleries Lafayette

This is not the Paris Opera. Lots of people think that, but it isn’t. It’s a department store. Just a department store. It’s also not even the shot of a department store that I really wanted – it’s a safety shot of a department store that I took after I thought that the shot I really wanted wasn’t really going to work. And it didn’t. Let me start at the beginning. Doing my due diligence before going to Paris, it seemed the Galleries Lafayette (Paris’ answer to Marshall Field’s – or is that the other way around?) would make for a good subject. I made a note and made sure that I managed to find my way there during one of my wanderings around the city. And, it was a good subject – as was obvious as soon as you set foot in the place. But the shot I wanted would take a little work. This central atrium area is covered by an enormous dome which looks down on the cosmetics department which in turn is dominated by a giant black Christian Dior monolith. I set out to capture all of this in one frame – get to about the fourth floor, slap on the 16mm lens, shoot on the diagonal to get the monolith and the apex of the dome and…well, it didn’t really work. I mean, I was able to get all of the elements in the frame, but it was just too crowded. Now, I would have shot the shot above regardless – the detail and color of the place was fantastic – but I really wanted the first one. I even edited that one – full HDR, the works. But it didn’t work. And since one of my goals coming out of Paris was edit tighter and be more honest with myself, I knew I couldn’t put it up. So, plan B. Which, to be fair, has become one of my more popular Paris photos. And it is nice. But it’s not what I wanted. It’s also not the Paris Opera. But lots of people think that.

Getting the Shot VIII

I don’t normally take pictures of people. I sure don’t shoot no portraits. When it comes to people, my interests in photography lean much more towards the interaction – or lack – of them in an environment. But sometimes you just can’t resist.

So there, I was. Sunday in Paris, hiking all over the frackin’ place. For this particular leg, I had hiked up the length of the Canal St. Martin from the Seine all the way to the Place de Stalingrad by way of Gare de L’Est and Gare du Nord. I’m not sure how long this all was but by the time I’d made it up north, my feet were telling me it had been long enough. For my final act of the day, I had planned on walking from Gare du Nord to Place de Stalingrad (a longer hike than I’d have thought – or maybe I was just tired) and then catching the Metro back to my hotel. As it happens, (as it always seems to happen) as I took one last look at my map, I saw something that looked interesting – another canal to the north east of Place de Stalingrad. Huh. Well, that might be kinda cool, let’s check it out. Honetement, the area around the canal actually could have been pretty cool but by the time I dragged myself over there, the light wasn’t great and I was just way too tired to try to find a good angle. I popped some happy snaps just to justify the hike and started to head vers the Metro.

As I got back to the entrance to the plaza, the combination of the sun and the elevated Metro made what I thought would be a compelling composition (turned out I was wrong). To get the shot, I hopped up into a slightly elevated lawn area to get my shots. Now, there were quite a few people out enjoying the afternoon, mostly in small groups, and I really didn’t pay them any mind. As it happened however, I had set up shop next to several Parisian, uh, gentlemen enjoying what was almost certainly not their first bottle of wine of the afternoon, and who knows what else.

They immediately took interest in me and my camera to a degree that I don’t always find healthy and started chatting quite animatedly amongst themselves. My French was nowhere near good enough to keep up, but I did catch something about paparazzi. After talking for a minute or so, one gentleman stood up and asked me to take his photo. I’m always leery when this sort of thing happens. It seems that this is never that simple – it’s always a hook. Invariably money will be demanded or confrontation will ensue (or maybe I just need to stop basing these conclusions on my experiences on the South and West sides of Chicago). At any rate, there didn’t seem to be any good way of begging off, so I lined up my camera and took one of those portrait things I’ve heard so much about.

And that was it. He thanked me – didn’t even ask to see the shot - and sat back down and went back to talking and drinking with his friends. I turned on my heels and made for the Metro. I really didn’t expect anything to come of this photo – I shot hundreds of frames while in Paris and I really just expected to delete this one when I got back to my computer. But a funny thing happened on the way to the recycling bin. I started to play around with in Photoshop: Black and White, crop it down a little and what do you know, a perfectly good (albeit posed) street portrait. Honestly, looking at a photo that I never planned on keeping, a few things start to stand out at me. I don’t like how the column behind the guy intersects his head, I’d have liked to have gotten a tighter crop on his face (although I did want to get that shirt in the frame) and I think I’d like to have blown out the background more – maybe even use my 50mm all the way open. Ultimately, for a photo that I took only get out of a situation: I wish I’d done a better job.

At the Red Mill

As soon as I had finished shooting off my last HDR bracket the Arc d’Triomphe, I was eager to get moving. While I thought I might have gotten some decent shots, I didn’t fully know exactly what I had. I did know that une grève française had thrown off my planned shoot for that night and that I was wasting a great sunset. What now lieutenant?

I broke out my map (lieutenant) and looked around for something interesting and something nearby. A quick consult of the Metro lines showed that I could probably make it up to Pigalle pretty quickly. I had walked around there earlier in the day and figured that the neighborhood might be, well, interesting at night. Besides, the Moulin Rouge was up there – surely that’s worth a shot or two, right?

Well, the Metro did its job and got me up there quickly or, if not quick enough to catch the rest of the sunset, at least in time to catch the blue hour. I was able to quickly get to the Red Mill, but getting a shot would be a little more challenging – it was a beautiful Paris spring night and the crowds were out. I managed to elbow my way onto an island in the middle of the street but there was no way I could fully set up my tripod in this mess. That actually wasn’t so bad – man cannot live by eye-level shots alone and I thought a low angle shot might work well here. I set my tripod on the ground and ripped off a bracket as calibration.

There were two problems that presented themselves. The first was traffic. I don’t mind light trails in certain shots, but usually I think they’re distracting. Fortunately, if you’re patient, you can usually just time your shots between the stoplights. If your bracket has longer exposures, it might take you a few cycles, but as long as the ambient light isn’t changing too fast - and if you’re patient – you can make it work. The second problem was motion, as it usually – though certainly not always – ruins multiple exposure HDR shots. I didn’t want the windmill arms to show up three different times in the final image, although my initial brackets were shot at larger apertures and therefore quicker shutter speeds which would have caused this effect. But – once those safety shots were out of the way – I was ready to experiment a little more. I set my camera so that my middle exposure was eight seconds (I forget offhand what the f/stop was) and fired off another bracket. I chimped after I was done and saw that I had one frame with the windmill arms having completed a full revolution. I didn’t know if this would work once I started the editing, but it was the effect I was going for.

Having been crouched down in an unusual (and somewhat painful) position to avoid the crowds and the traffic – and having been holding that position for a while to time my shots between the stoplights – I almost fell over when I stood up. I grabbed my tripod and slowly – very slowly – made my way down the Boulevard de Clichy.

Catch the Blue Shirt Special

One of the advantages of living relatively close to Paris is that I can plan out photo projects that will span several visits and be relatively confidant that they’ll actually be accomplished in a fairly short timeframe. Now, if you’ve seen my photos, you’ll know that railroads are a particular interest of mine – so what better thing to shoot than the railroad stations of Paris? That’s right – nothing. There is nothing better in Paris than that. I’m glad we agree.

I’ll have one or two others to feature at some point, but today’s photo is courtesy of the Gare de Montparnasse. Now, of the three stations I’ve been to in Paris (so far), I have to say that I liked Montparnasse the least - but I feel like in some ways it should have been my favorite. After all, it is built in a brutal mid-century style that I am usually a huge fan of. But for some reason, it just didn’t fully register with me. Not really sure why but regardless I found myself wandering the station trying to find something to shoot that would capture the sense of place.

Presently, I found myself in this ticketing area and my eye was immediately drawn to the contrast of the yellow kiosks and the grey concrete of the hall. The fact that the arrival-departure sign was prominent in the frame was a bonus. I got into a shooting position but held off since I wanted a relatively clean frame. I knew that I would have some people in the frame but I wanted some sort of balance and certainly didn’t want anyone cut off by the edge of the frame.

As I held my position, the gentleman in the center walked into the frame – perfect I thought, if I can get him in the middle – between and in front of the kiosks but under the sign – that might be what I want. I waited for him to get into the right position, all the time afraid that someone would walk into the frame. Finally, out of the corner of my eye I sensed someone walking into the frame on the left forcing me to shoot. Blue shirt guy wasn’t exactly where I wanted him, but I had no choice and fired off my HDR bracket. That was about the end of my thinking about this shot – I kept going around the station for a little while longer and then decamped to the Boulevard Montparnasse to find a café for some café.

A few weeks later I was back home editing down my Paris photos. The first pass is always tedious as I go through and find the obvious rejects. It’s basically me slouched at my desk, staring at Adobe Bridge and alternating between hitting ‘6’ and the right arrow on the keyboard. Until this bracket sequence came up and I bolted upright in my chair. See, I had known that there were people at those first two kiosks, but that was the extent of my awareness, so focused was I on waiting for blue shirt guy to get where I wanted him. Imagine my surprise when I realized he had friends.

Triumph

Well, this seems as good as any photo to finish the year out – although it doesn’t hurt that it might be my favorite photo that I made this year. The story of this one is the intersection of planning and luck – mostly the latter. When checking lighting information for my trip to Paris this last May, I realized that I was in for some luck – the sun would be setting directly down the Champs-Élysées and if I could get on top of the Arc d’Triomphe at that time, I might be able to get some interesting shots of the city.

Of course, it wouldn’t be that easy.

Walking up the Champs-Élysées, I realized I was in for a great day of shooting as the sunset was spectacular (as you can, well, see for yourself). But as I walked up the road, looking at the Arc, I was curious: shouldn’t I be able to see the people on top? Ah well, first time in Paris. What do I know? Well, making my way to the base of the Arc, I was in for some Karmic Irony as my favorite French word was staring me in the face from the ticket office: grève.

Well, now what? I’m burning a great sunset and I’ve got to figure something out. I made a bunch of images of monument from the base – to include the tomb of the Unknown Soldier – and while some were good, I wasn’t really thrilled with what I had. Since I already figured this evening was blown, I decided to experiment. I went back to the other side of the Place Charles de Gaulle and tried to see if I could eliminate all traffic on the street through a combination of long shutter speeds, a circular polarizer and an ND filter. I thought it might make for an interesting shot. As to whether it worked or not, I leave to you to decide:

Happy New Year Sports Fans. More of the same coming in '12. So you've got that going for you.

Getting the Shot VII

My last full day in Paris was my day to finally take in some art. The Louvre didn’t really interest me – I didn’t want to stand in lines – and the Musee d’Orsay was closed so that left me with the Pompidou Center. This actually worked out well since I like modern art and I’d thought it was an interesting building ever since I first laid eyes on it in freshman French back in high school. I was traveling light this day since my feet and shoulders had been beaten down over the previous few days – just carrying my point and shoot – but I didn’t think it would be a big deal to not have the heavy gear.

And, to be fair, it wasn’t. The sky was a pretty washed out overcast which would have made it hard to do any sort of outdoor photography anyway and I never really feel that shooting in museums – or at least shooting the art in them – yields anything more than snapshots. Anyway, I had just finished my tour of the galleries and was getting ready to head back outside and knock out a few more chapters from yet another Hemmingway book when I saw this woman standing in front of the window looking – wistfully? thoughtfully? photographically? – out at the Parisian skyline. I grabbed my camera out of my bag and started to quicken my pace to get closer – that camera’s lens maxes out at 60mm – and I was sure she was going to move before I could get into position. It was all I could do not to break out into a run but it seems that I wasn’t the only person who spied this scene. As I got to the shooting point, a women on my right had a step on me and more importantly was right were I wanted to be, one step to my right and squared up on the scene. She had her camera out making basically the same photo and, at the risk the scene might break up, I fired off this shot as a safety shot. It was a good thing I did – within about a second of taking this, the woman turned back to the gallery and moved off.

I put my camera back in my bag, headed outside to the Place Georges Pompidou, cracked open A Moveable Feast, and started to read.

Getting the Shot VI

So sometimes being a jerk pays off. This was taken on my last night in Paris in the attempt to finally get a decent shot of the Eifel Tower. At a picnic on the Champ de Mars a few days earlier someone had recommended shooting from the Trocadero and since I hadn’t been there yet, it seemed like a good place to check out. Rain had been threating all day and while it never quite materialized, it did produce some pretty nice clouds at dusk. As eager as I was to use those though, I was a little disappointed on getting to the top of the Trocadero. There are basically two levels that you can shoot from – a lower level that would allow me to have my camera up against the railing with nothing in front of it and an upper level directly behind the former. As it happened, the lower level was closed down for some sort of maintenance, forcing me to both shoot from the upper level and having to aim my camera up higher than I would have liked causing the horizon to be lower in the frame (if you look closely, you can see the top of the construction fence at the bottom of the frame).

Anyway, I got there sufficiently early enough that I had my run of area so I was able to set up my tripod exactly on the centerline of the plaza and as far forward as possible. Unfortunately, it was still too light outside, but I started to shoot HDR brackets and wait for the light to change. As it began to get darker, more and more tourists began to fill up the Trocadero to both get photos of the Tower and await the evening light show. I could tell that some people were annoyed that I was set up on the prime shooting location but no one said anything and I knew that if I moved, I’d never get that spot back. When you look at this photo though, it is interesting to note that there are probably a hundred people or more clustered around me as I’m making this shot.

I continued to shoot HDR brackets every few minutes as the light continued to change and even managed to have conversations with an Irish couple that was in town to visit their daughter at University and a French businessman from Toulouse (go Airbus!). By the time I was done, it was pitch black, the crowds were thinning out and I was tired of standing in the same spot for almost three hours. I walked down from the Trocadaro, hiked down the length of the Champ de Mars and caught the Metro back to my hotel.

Getting the Shot IV

Well sports fans, there’s really not much to say about this one. This was the second photo that I made on my first ever trip to Paris. I had just gotten to my hotel from the airport, had dropped off my bag and was walking down the Boulevard St. Germain en route to Le Café Deux Magots when I saw this gentleman crossing the street. Now, I don’t do much Street Photography (although I certainly enjoy looking at it) but I had resolved to try my hand at while in Paris and I had actually set up my camera for quick shooting. I’m glad I did – one look at this guy and I couldn’t get my camera up fast enough. Is it possible to look more French?