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.