Notre Dame de Paris

The Story
This was my third time in Paris. I've had been there in the summer of 1996 with my father and in March of 2004 with my girlfriend (my wife now). This time (June, 2008) I went there with my wife because it was the baptism of her cousin. We went just for a weekend and stayed in her's aunt's house in Paris. I was lucky, because the original plan was to stay at another aunt's house in the suburbs. I was a bit disappointed with this plan because it was kinda sad going to Paris and don't seeing Paris, but only the suburbs. It turned out that we could stay in the aunt's house in Paris, instead.
I knew that it wouldn't be too much time to wander around in Paris. So the only opportunity that I probably would have it will be the day of the arrival. When we landed in Paris, it was raining and I once again felt that I would miss the chance. But it turned out that the rain stopped and we went home to leave the bags. I had about 4, maybe 5 hours top to rush to the main places and try to get some photos. I didn't wanted to spend those few hours running around because in the next day I had to get up very early to go to the baptism and then we would head back to Lisboa. So I decided that I would only go to a few places: The Notre Dame, The Louvre (outside only, of course:)) and The Eiffel Tower.
To this short trip I decided to take only the essential gear: the D80, two lenses: the 10-20 and the 50 and the SB600 flash. The 10-20 was to the outside photos, the 50 and the flash for the inside church and portrait photos. Just an outside note: beware of using flashes inside a church in a country you can't really speak the language :).
So the tour started in the Notre Dame where I took a few photos (I never got closer to the cathedral than this photo shows), then the Louvre (where I missed the flexibility of the 18-70 lens) and finally the Eiffel Tower. I've walked all this path and skipped all the public transports to get the most of it.

Equipment / Technical Info
Nikon D80
Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC

Shutter Speed: 1/160 second
Aperture: F/9.0
Focal Length: 10 mm
ISO Speed: 100

Original Photo


Post Processing
When I returned from Paris, I went to the computer to check the results and pick some photos to publish. I took few photos of this trip, the most of them were from the baptism, but there were some from the walk in the streets of Paris. At the time my choice was a photo of the Eiffel Tower that got published and I forgot about the others. Remember this was June of 2008.
In March of 2009, some technical procedure was being made in my workplace and I was asked to be in standby mode to do some remote testing. I have a problem. I really need to sleep at least 7 hours in the workdays and this standby meant that I would have to stay up 2 or 3 hours more than usual. So, with a lot of waiting time on my hands, I decided to look to my photo archive to see if there was any photo that it was worth processing.
Since June of 2008 that this photo was waiting for a chance and this was the night.
I started, as usual, playing around with the Lightroom presets and tried the "Matt's 300 Look - Strong" preset (you can find it here: http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2008/monday-presets-the-300-look) from Matt Kloskowski. I then decreased the Vignetting, converted to Grayscale, increased the Sharpening and the Contrast, and played around a bit with the Gray levels (nothing fancy, but essential: I increased the green and orange to lighten the trees and the cathedral).
And that was it for Lightroom. I then exported it as a PSD file and opened it in CS4.
In CS4, I've done: Auto Tone, Auto Contrast and Auto Color. Converted to Black and White and cropped part of it to my like.
This gave me the full size (10Mp) final image.
I usually publish my photos with 1024px in the largest size and use a great Photoshop action by Manyk to do the re-size.
You can find it here: http://manyk.deviantart.com/art/Web-Sharpening-with-Photoshop-29038461

Final Photo


Link to image
http://jpgmn.deviantart.com/art/Notre-Dame-de-Paris-114681316