Haf's Blog | Cristian Ivan

In the first half of August I spent a week in Paris, on vacation. I’m starting a series of long read posts to describe some of the events I experienced in Paris and to show some of my favorite photos shot during my stay.

Paris has never been one of my top travel destinations, but since I took up photography I started to enjoy shooting photos in the urban environment more than anything else. About a month ago I was totally clueless about where to spend my summer vacation. After a ridiculously short period of thinking I narrowed my search for a vacation place to only a couple of cities: Barcelona and Paris. Paris won because it’s the larger city of the two, thus the chances for finding more photographic opportunities are higher; Barcelona is still on my travel shortlist though.
Finding a decent hotel located very close to a subway station was relatively easy, although it would have helped a lot to book the plane tickets and hotel earlier.

I asked some basic questions on my favorite photography boards (dpreview.com) regarding lens selection and general safety measures worth to be taken into account and I received a lot of great info, although many of the opinions I read over the internet were highly debatable. A surprisingly high number of people described Paris like some sort of paradise for con artists, pickpockets, thieves and scammers. This might sound a bit sad, but as a Romanian nothing that I have read had any impact on me, probably because I am used with all kinds of crap that I see in my country everyday. To me things like keeping an eye around myself, going by the saying “beware the friendly stranger” and not falling for classic scams like the shell game (or also know as “cups and balls”) comes natural. To paraphrase the noble heroes of Southpark, one must first wade through all the scams and con artists to enjoy Paris.

Day 1 in Paris
I arrived in Paris in the morning, as a benefit of choosing the earliest flight of the day. It was 9:30 and I had already left my luggage at the hotel’s reception, so I hopped in a metro and I headed for La Defense, my #1 target for Paris. I have literally spent days watching photos of this neighborhood on flickr and I liked it a lot, so much that I made this my top priority: first place to visit, first place to photograph and come back to it for several times to cover all the possible settings (morning light, evening). The moment I stepped out of the Esplanade de La Defense metro station I recognized the surroundings based on the extensive number of photos I had previously looked at. It was love at first sight, probably because in Romania we are nowhere near having such a neighborhood made up entirely by modern skyscrapers. From where I stand, the only European place that comes close is the financial district of Frankfurt am Maine, but I might be biased because I haven’t visited Frankfurt yet.

One of the attractions of this esplanade seems to be a tall cylinder composed of a multitude of thin, multicolored pipes.

Some of the buildings were quite a treat to look at and photograph, viewed from sideways the following building looked like a rolled sheet of paper. Viewed from the front, the building looked like some sort of giant Christmas tree.

Next stop was the Grand Arch, arguably the most important tourist attraction of the area. The arch, essentially a hollow cube, is set to be tall enough to accommodate the Notre Dame de Paris inside. I didn’t bother to shoot the whole building, the light was too harsh and others have shot the Arch already, far better than I could do it., so I concentrated on capturing some people climbing the stairs.

At some point I walked back towards the Esplanade de La Defense metro station and I shot a random snap of a man relaxing in the maybe too powerful sun

After walking all the way from La Defense to Champs Elysees I headed towards the Eiffel Tower. On the streets found in the vicinity of the tower I stumbled across quite a few interesting shop windows, here’s one of them:

When I got to the tower I was a bit disappointed by it, probably because I expected it to be a lot larger. The area and park where the tower is located are nothing to write home about, but I guess it must be very hard to upkeep a place that is visited by thousands of tourists daily. One thing that caught my eye were two monks I found right under the Eiffel Tower.

After looking at the Eiffel Tower for quite a few minutes I walked towards the Trocadero station.

The following place was one of my favorite spot of looking at/shooting the Eiffel Tower

Later in the day I met with a French photographer, Yanick Delafoge. He was very friendly, I really enjoyed his company and we shot some photos in the Montmartre and Pigalle areas. You can check his blog called “Street Photography in Paris” by following this link.

Man juggling with a football ball in front of the Basilique du Sacre-Coeur

Street artists in the Montmartre area

Abandoned bike

On the move – the light was right so I couldn’t resist not taking this photo

Tourists in front of Moulin Rouge, Pigalle area.

A merchant, late in the night

Portrait of a man, in front of the Opera House

I have always wondered what it is like to photograph a wedding. As a photography enthusiast I often come across wedding photography portfolios and various discussions that take place in real life among fellow photographers or on Internet boards.
About two weeks ago I went to the wedding of a couple of my friends (Marius and Cristina) as a guest, but I did take a “light” kit with me composed of 3 lenses and a flash. Note: those that are not into techy might just as well skip the following photographs and jump directly to the section of the post where the photos start.
I’m a prime lens lover, but since I had never attended a wedding before I wanted to play it safe and I borrowed a Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 lens from a friend because I had no idea about what focal lengths I would use. I assume that a professional photographer should check the church in which the wedding will take place before the actual day of the wedding, but I didn’t bother to do this because I was just a random guest like any of the others and the couple had already hired a professional photographer and a camera man to do the job.

Orthodox churches are notorious for their poor lighting and the church where the wedding ceremony took place made no exception. I was amazed about just how low the light was in that church, it gave a new meaning to the words “shooting in available light”. Natural light was close to inexistent and the only decent sources of light were two chandeliers placed in the area where the couple and priests were standing. There were a few other sources of light as well that projected some harsh light on the people’s faces. To make things worse, the church must have been recently renovated since ladder scaffolds were placed near the interior walls.
Just to make a point about the lighting conditions, I had to use ISO values ranging from 5000 up to 6400 with an aperture of f/2.8 and a shutter speed of 1/60s or 1/100s. At one time I even used something like ISO 8000 with an f/1.4 aperture (!). It might have helped to use the flash, but I saved it for the outside photos and for the restaurant party. The pro photographer used a flash (on camera, no diffusing) for most of its shots, I don’t know if he did that because his gear prevented him from shooting in available light or because it was just his personal preference.

One of the funny things is that most of the shots were taken with lenses I rarely or never (in the case of the borrowed lens) use. My all time favorite focal length and lens is the Nikkor 85mm f/1.4, but this time I used it only for a few photos. The Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 got the most usage, especially in the church, followed by the Nikkor 16mm f/2.8 AF-D fisheye for a lot of the photos shot at the restaurant where at times 24mm felt a bit too narrow even on my full frame camera.

I found the wedding ceremony pretty boring per se, mostly because nothing exciting worth shooting happened (well, to put it nicely, at least from my point of view). I have to give credit here to the professional photographers that manage to make some great shots in such settings. Frankly, if the bride, groom or even some of the guests don’t have some interesting reactions during the ceremony the only shots worth to be taken are just the standard ones that are part of the ritual, moments that a pro photographer is obliged to capture because that’s why he/she is paid for.

Here are a couple of photos from the wedding ceremony:The following is my favorite photo shot during the ceremony: it pictures a priest praying, I think it’s such a moving moment.Here’s a photo shot in front of the church, after the ceremony was over

We had a few spare minutes to stop on our way to the restaurant in a park for a short (make that very short) photo session. In the last photo you can see also see the godparents.

And here are some photos from the restaurant:

All in all, I am happy with the results, considering this was the very first wedding I have ever attended and that I virtually didn’t miss any of the key moments.

Last weekend I went on a photo trip with orasul.ro to Lake Balea; this was my first trip to this place and the first time I traveled on the Transfagarasan road. Before leaving home I watched a lot of photos shot from the top of this road and my expectation were very high for this trip since I always want to shoot “my version” of the road/scenery/building.
Sadly, I spoiled three chances of making that *perfect* photo. I wasted the first chance on Saturday, when we stopped the bus close to the top of the road, in the southern valley. From what I had managed to find out from the other folks around the differences between the two valleys can be dramatic. This was the case here too. The southern valley was flooded with harsh sun, so I was terribly disappointed. Usually when the sun glows bright at noon I don’t even bother to pull out my camera from the bag, but in this case I triggered happily a slew of photos, for some even used the auto exposure bracketing feature on my camera in order to turn those shots into HDR toned photos.
The second attempt to shoot the curvy road (the same portion featured in the Top Gear show) failed in the evening. The sky was covered by a thick layer of clouds and mist, the weather was very whimsical and the viewing distance was too short for shooting anything at infinity.
This is the only decent photo from that evening.
Sunday morning I didn’t even try to shoot the road, the same thick mist covered the horizon and the weather conditions were similar to the ones depicted above.

One of the things that strike me the most is that whenever I plan to go to some event / new place I always expect to shoot some fantastic photos, but most of the time I end up shooting some photos I really like that are not related in any way to the event / place I am at. In other words, the journey is more rewarding than the destination and I often find myself appreciating the small details that catch my eye.
In a not so random sequence (actually I will try to stick to a chronological order) I will show a few photos from the two day trip, the rest of the photos can be seen on my flickr photo stream.
We stopped at the 80 km mark outside Bucharest, at a petrol station. Nearby there are also some dilapidated buildings: shops, a hotel, a restaurant and a garden.

The next stop took place at the Cathedral of Curtea de Arges. I had visited this place many times before, so I tried to discover some new things around the cathedral. This was a place that looked like some kind of storage place for old or broken building fragments.

Just a random photo of the stone wall that surrounds the cathedral, since I’m such a bokeh whore I just had to take this photo. Taken with Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 AF-D.

I took the following photo in the southern valley of the Transfagarasan; as I said above, the sun at that time was very harsh, but I really wanted to take some shots of this scenery.

The northern side of the mountain is completely different from the southern side. The access to the northern side is made through an unlit tunnel, long of almost 900 meters that connects the two valleys. At the time of our visit the southern side was sunny and the weather was hot; the northern valley was just the opposite: everything was covered by a thick layer of mist; the weather was chilly, so cold that large portions of snow could still be seen.
This is the only decent photo I managed to take on Saturday, in the afternoon; I would have loved to shoot the curvy road on some good weather, but I hope I will come back someday to try again.

On our way home we stopped in Sibiu for a couple of hours. This was the first time I visited Sibiu after I had discovered photography, so this made the experience a bit more challenging. I wasn’t impressed at all by the historical center and the pedestrian area, I think the rest of the city is far more interesting and rewarding; too bad we didn’t have too much time to wonder around the city.

Here are some photos I took in Sibiu

One of the last stops of our trip took place near the Roman fortress Arutela.