Roue de Paris

In the last post, I described how I got totally useless results trying to photograph the Roue de Paris ferris wheel on my first evening in Paris. The second night, overcast but with no rain, I went out again to get much closer to the wheel and get both sharp "stop motion" shots and a good motion blur shot. With that goal in mind, I headed to the Place de la Concorde with my 18-200mm on the camera and the 70-300 on my belt for good measure. When I reached the Place de la Concorde, I knew right away that I was going to have much better luck this night.

The first objective was to get a sharp, "stop motion" shot. I picked a spot that actually allowed the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde to be part of the composition. After watching the wheel up close for a few moments, it became clear that my primary motion challenge was that of the lights decorating the wheel, and not the movement of the wheel itself. While I could certainly have pushed the ISO a bit to increase the overall exposure, I think this photo captures the ambiance pretty well.

As always, click on a photo to see a larger version.

40mm, ISO 400, f/4.5, 1/60 © Richard Critz

Next up, get a good motion blur showing the wheel in action. This proved to be harder than expected because they didn't seem to want to run the wheel for any extended period of time. In a gross overreaction to my disappointing results the previous night, I started with a 15 second exposure. That didn't work. Not at all. Even 8 seconds was way, way too much but I can show you that one without fear of your clawing your eyes out. I also went with the smallest aperture the lens offers in an effort to keep the image from blowing out entirely while waiting for the wheel to move. That part, at least, did work.

48mm, ISO 400, f/29, 8 sec © Richard Critz

After a bit more fiddling about, I got what I was looking for with a 2 second exposure:

48mm, ISO 400, f/29, 2 sec © Richard Critz

And then the magic happened. While I succeeded in the getting the motion blur I was looking for, I still wasn't really happy with the image. I just didn't have that "pop" I was looking for. Then it occurred to me that the D300 has the ability to do something called "multiple exposure". This is a setting that essentially allows me to take a specified number of exposures and have the camera combine them all into a single image. I had never intentionally done it before (I did one by accident at my sister-in-law's wedding while trying to set up something completely different -- that didn't count). A mad scramble to find the setting in the menus ensues. Once I found it, I had no idea if it would work like a film camera where each subsequent exposure adds to the overall light in the frame, eventually causing the image to be blown out. I decided to assume this to be the case and promptly backed everything off 2 stops.

Well, it turns out, the camera is smarter than the photographer and it knew enough not to oversaturate the image. So after a several tests, I ended up right back where I started with the single, frozen shots for exposure settings. I did several with 4 exposures in a frame and ended up with several frames containing 8 exposures each. Those are the ones I've chosen to publish and here are 2, from different perspectives:

48mm, ISO 400, f/4.5, 1/60, 8 exposures © Richard Critz

40mm, ISO 400, f/4.5, 1/80, 8 exposures © Richard Critz

20mm, ISO 200, f/22, 1.6" © Richard Critz

I then moved closer for some shots looking through the axis of the wheel. You may remember that I had the wrong lenses with me the previous evening. Tonight, I left the 12-24 wide angle in the hotel room and now I needed it. I made do with my 18-200 zoom but I couldn't get the angles I really wanted. I've included the best of the "blurs" here -- I think it looks a bit like a waterfall wrapped around the outside of the wheel. Some of the other shots can be seen here.

At this point, my fingers were starting to get cold and I was ready to hit the sack in preparation for the trip home the next morning. As I was folding the tripod I happened to turn towards the Eiffel Tower and realized immediately that I couldn't put the camera away just yet. I've always wanted a good shot of the Tower with its powerful rotating beacon at the top caught in the picture.

105mm, ISO 400, f/5.3, 1/3" © Richard Critz

I've also wanted to capture the many strobes on the Tower that light up at the top of each hour. When I was in Paris in July 2010, I didn't have my tripod with me so I shot a sequence of handheld frames and then merged them in Photoshop.

Photoshop merge of a number of handheld shots © Richard Critz

I was pretty pleased with the result but it still didn't capture the true effect. The magic was still working and I got it all in a single image without having to resort to the wonders of Photoshop.

112mm, ISO 400, f/5.3, 1/4" © Richard Critz

Paris reflections

The company I used to fly for established offices in London and Paris several years ago.  As a result, both have been a regular destination for us and I have taken most all of the "standard" photographs.  Now, when I go out in either city, I have to give myself an "assignment".  My default assignment, if one can call it that, is inspired by Jay Maisel in an interview he did with Scott Kelby.  When Jay goes out walking in his neighborhood in New York, he is looking for interesting faces and textures.  He shoots anything he sees that strikes his fancy in that area and usually comes out with some good shots.  I had some success with that back in the summer of 2010 so, as I say, it's become my default.

In preparing for my trip last week, the weather forecast for was cold and wet for the entire stay.  I nearly left the camera at home.  Luckily, a good friend and outstanding photographer pointed out this article written by National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson and I planned to give his philosophy a try.

After 2 days in London without a single good reason to get the camera out, we arrived in Paris on Wednesday evening, just after the rain had stopped.  The first thing I noticed as we approached the hotel is that there is now this enormous ferris wheel, the Roue de Paris, installed across the Champs Elysées.  All thoughts of looking for reflections on the wet pavement went right out the window and I started planning how to get a good "blur" shot of the wheel.

70mm, ISO 400, f/4.5, 1/13 © Richard Critz

By the time dinner was done, it was nearing midnight and I was afraid the wheel would shut down. I grabbed both my 70-300 and 12-24 lenses, figuring one or the other would give me just what I needed, and headed out.  Just a block from the hotel I snapped this shot, thinking the different color lights and their reflection from the sidewalk was pretty cool  and that it would satisfy my "assignment".

I got about halfway to the Place de la Concorde and decided this was the perfect place set up the tripod in the middle of a crosswalk.  I was zoomed all the way at 300mm but the wheel was filling the frame nicely.  I did several shots at shutter speeds between 1/6" and 3" and thought, based on what I could see on the LCD, that I might have something usable.  Unfortunately, I was wrong.  The shorter speed shots, intended to freeze the motion of the wheel and/or the moving lights, really still left me with a blurry image.  The longer exposure shots, because of my distance from the wheel, picked up a great deal of ambient light from headlights driving towards me and from street lights between me at the wheel, probably a quarter mile away.  This caused a problem with flare, color shift from mishmash of different color temperature of the lights, and produced an image that looked as if I had shot it handheld with a point-and-shoot camera, as you can see here. Of course, I didn't realize this until I got back to the room and loaded the images onto the computer.

300mm, ISO 200, f/29, 3" © Richard Critz

Luckily, as I walked back to the hotel, I managed to shift gears back to my original assignment: looking for reflections on the wet sidewalk.  I switched to the 12-24 because the 70 would have required me to stand in the street, a target for crazy Parisian drivers.  I got this image at the entrance to the Virgin Megastore, which never seems to close.  A few passers-by gave me funny looks, trying to figure out why I could possibly want a picture of the store entrance without any people in it at all.

24mm, ISO 400, f/8, 1/15 © Richard Critz

And then I stumbled across the "image of the night".  The Parisians love their outdoor cafés, no matter the hour, the temperature, or amount of water falling from the sky.  They put up space heaters and curtains and bundle up and shiver while eating their late night snack or having a drink.  I didn't want to intrude on these people so I couldn't reasonably go close, but the 70 would have left out much of the scene.  So, of course, the one lens I really needed was sitting back in the hotel.  Nonetheless, I got this capture with great reflections and the bonus juxtaposition of 2 completely different pools of color.

24mm, ISO 400, f/8, 0.4" © Richard Critz

Of course, I was disappointed at not getting the shot of the wheel that I had imagined but I was thrilled with this unexpected bonus.

© Richard Critz

The next day, I played a little with applying a tilt-shift effect in Photoshop.  When I started, I thought this shot was going to be a great candidate for the effect.  I soon discovered that even with cropping to better contain the blur of the effect, a standard band of focus looked silly.  I tried a radial blur instead, centered on the guy leaving the café.  That was a little better but kind of missed the mark.  And, of course, the colors are already so saturated that there was no decent way to push it further. So I declared that experiment a failure and moved on to planning my next assault on the Roue de Paris.  More on that in my next entry.

And so it begins...

As a corporate pilot, I get to travel all over the world. I get to see amazing things and trying to capture those feelings, I grow as a photographer. This blog is a chance for me to capture not only experiences, but notes to myself about photographic experiments and what I learned from them.


I find that I shoot sporadically, needing a "theme" or "assignment" or some other inspiration to get me really looking at the world like a photographer.  In thinking back over most of the sets of pictures I've captured over the past year, I'm finding that I wish I had made some notes on the process -- a diary, as it were -- to be able to look back at them later.  My first 2 posts are already planned, to cover my 2 evenings of shooting in Paris last week.  I'm trying to get them down on "paper" before they leave my feeble memory altogether.


While much of what I write here will be interesting primarily to me, you are welcome here: welcome to read, to comment, to commiserate.


And a final note: I've never done a blog before.  As such, I have no idea what many of the knobs and switches on this software do.  I'm going to be experimenting some and I expect there will be some fairly dramatic changes to the appearance of this blog, if nothing else, over the next couple of weeks.  Among other things, I'm likely to experiment with the available templates until I find one that "fits" me.