A view from Paris

I have been neglecting the blog a bit this year, which I’m not happy about. But with working a different job right now, to get over this crazy times, I’m not really in the mood to spend even more time at the PC every day. I’m just happy when I can turn it off in the evening, and don’t look at it anymore.

But it’s not a good situation, I need to get back into it. The longer I delay that, the harder it gets. At least the muscle memory from years of editing is still there and using Photoshop as easy as ever. Opening Photoshop after weeks of not using it is just the same as before.

So for today, here is a shot from long time ago, taken one evening in Paris. For those curious, this is a blend of three exposures, edited a bit in Camera Raw and then blended in Photoshop, with few edits on top.

From the Debilly Footbridge

Quite the simple photo today. This one was taken from the Debilly Footbridge (Passerelle Debilly) whis is of course as you can see in Parish, close to the Eiffel tower. It’s one of the many things one can use as the foreground element whan taking photos of the tower in the distance.

Thie is a blend form three exposures, done in Photoshop.

Clear blue sky at Pont de pierre

I really do very few vertical photos. You may have noticed on this blog, there are not many of them. I just don’t like them. The only exception is when I do a vertorama, and even those are more often in a square format than a portrait one. And they don’t really fit landscapes anyway. But let’s do one of the rare ones I have taken today.

This is a single photo, split into three and then blended back together in Photoshop. I took three photos originaly, but something caused movement of the camera, and they would not align properly. This is the Pont de Pierre in Bordeaux, France, during a very blue hour. No clouds in sight.

Lights under the Eiffel Tower

While the occasion why the Eiffel Tower was lit up in these colors was a sad one (this photo is from 2016, right after the bomb explosions in Belgium), the way the lit it up was interesting. I always thought, they just use the lights that are already built into the tower and just change the color. But on this occasion, I saw it working differently. Instead, they had a setup of lights right in front of the tower. They used them to give the top of the tower the red color. If you look closely into this photo, you can see the red lights shining from the bottom, right under the tower.

This is a two shot panorama, each shot from a single exposure. Combined and edited in Photoshop. I had a lot of lens flares here, as there were a lot of street lamps closeby and it’s really hard to shade the 17mm TSE lens. I also had quite the problems with color banding here and while I managed to remove a lot of it, maybe there wills till be some in the sky. It just did not want to go away, and I did not want to replace the whole sky just because of it.

Sparking Eiffel tower in the background

This is one of my favorite spots to take a photo with the Eiffel tower from. The road makes for a really nice leading line into the photo, and you can easily catch some car light on it when doing a long exposure. And it’s not such a popular spot, that most of the time there is nobody there. Not like under the Eiffel tower that is. And if you are there at the right time, there will also be this nice sparkling on the tower itself.

This photo was taken from the bridge Mirabeau in Paris, the left side to be exact. I really regret not doing this as a panorama. Looking through my photo library, I thought I did, as right the next photo was the view to the right of this one, but regrettably, I zoomed out, and no panorama software wanted to blend the files together. Sometimes it works though. If the overlap is big enough, you can sometimes create panoramas form photos that were just taken from the same spot with a similar view. Did a lot of them over the years.

This photo is a blend of 4 exposures, done in Photoshop. I used one as the base, one to get some detail in the dark areas and two to darken the highlights. I alro blended in some of the light trails from the darker exposures, so the road looks more busy.

And here is also a comparison to the original RAW file. This is actually not the 0EV, but the +1EV, as I used that one for the base of the photo. You can easily see, that I tend to shoot my photos on the darker side. This is simply because it’s much easier to recover shadow areas, than the bright areas from a RAW file.