The Story This was my third time in Paris (check this story to get more details). The Eiffel Tower was my main goal in this photo trip. After the great result in shooting "Cristo Rei" (see the King of Darkness photo story) I was looking forward to get a similar shot with one of the greatest monuments in history. When we arrived at the Eiffel Tower, I started to try some different angles and I quickly discovered that the tower is too big, even for my 10-20, to fit in one photo. At least the way I had imagined it. I took several photos from below, from the street between the tower and Trocadero, and even from across the bridge over the Seine that connects this two places. It was from this last place that I took this photo. My idea was to capture the lines in the pavement, guiding the eyes to the tower which was backed by a great sky.
Equipment / Technical Info Nikon D80 Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC
1/50 second F/7.1 10 mm 100
Original Photo
Post Processing This photo was my first choice from the Paris trip. My original intention was to apply the same treatment as in King of Darkness. After a couple tries I concluded that it wasn't the best treatment for this photo (tip: each photo is one of a kind, rarely you can apply the same exact treatment to two different photos). So I just added some Contrast and Vignetting in Lightroom and moved on to CS3. In CS3 I used the Virtual Photographer plug-in (you can find it here: http://www.optikvervelabs.com) with the setting "Sepia" but changed the Effect to "Colorize". I liked this effect because it gave an old look to the photo (hence the title: 1889 - the year of the completion of the monument). After the plug-in, I increased the Brightness, Contrast and Vignetting, applied Auto Tone and Auto Contrast, and added some Shadows/Highlights to reduce some of the highlights (I didn't touched the shadows part). And that was it.
The Story This was my third time in Paris... After the leaving Notre Dame we've walked to the Louvre and finally to the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower was my main goal in this photo trip. After the great result in shooting "Cristo Rei" (see the King of Darkness photo story) I was looking forward to get a similar shot with one of the greatest monuments in history. The distance between the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower is quite a bit but as we wanted to get the most of our short stay in Paris, we decided to leave the public transports and walk across the streets. Maybe I would have some other photo opportunities this way. When we arrived at the Eiffel Tower, I started to try some different angles and I quickly discovered that the tower is too big, even for my 10-20, to fit in one photo. At least the way I had imagined it. I took several photos from below, from the street between the tower and Trocadero, and even from across the bridge over the Seine that connects this two places. I didn't went to the Champs de Mars because the sun was setting in Trocadero so I would be with the sun in front of the camera (one tip: light is everything, don't try to take photos against the light if the objective is to capture, not the sunset itself, but what's between it and the camera). With this limitation on mind, I explored the most I could and took about 20 photos of the tower. It was time to return home and rest for the next morning baptism.
Equipment / Technical Info Nikon D80 Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC
1/125 second F/5.0 10 mm 100
Original Photo
Post Processing As happened with Notre Dame de Paris photo, this one was left in the archive until that standby night almost a year after. This one was in the queue that night and had exactly the same post processing as the previous. I've only imported it into Lightroom and copied the Notre Dame settings into this one. In CS4, the post processing was also the same. If interested, please check the Notre Dame de Paris photo story.
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
In this blog I will tell you a story about my photos. Where were they taken, why did I took them and what have I done with them between the camera and the web. This is not a Photoshop training blog, nor a photography tips blog. This is just a place where I share with you all that makes some photo look like it looks.
About me My name is João Pedro Neves, I am from Lisboa, Portugal and I was born in 1975. I am a professional software developer and enthusiastic photographer. I currently own a Nikon D80 and 4 lenses: Sigma 10-20, Nikkor 18-70, Nikkor 50 1.8D, Nikkor 70-300VR.
