A day on Île-de-France

When the Rock'n'Roll train arrived at Gare de l'Est Friday around noon, we only had two and a half days to get back home. Even though, fortunately, I've been to Paris before, it was so little it was intimidating. To make things even worse, we lost all of Friday to organisational issues, due to problems with the tickets and difficulties with accommodation, and as we wanted to spend most of Sunday in Strasbourg, all we had left was not much ‒ a single day.

The city was just as I remembered it ‒ French. For me, it means a feeling of disorganisation, chaotic traffic, strikes and protests, an ever-present feeling of negligence... but on the other hand great food, attractive women, a lot of glamour, art, and history, all mangled up to form a society that somehow miraculously manages not to fall apart. :-)


Although this is not the line, I like it how elevated "rail" in Paris drives on rubber wheels instead of tracks... makes it a lot more survivable than Chicago. Trust me, I had a track right under my window.


Needless to say, you can't see much in a single day. It was almost a sacrilege to leave so soon, after only seeing a few major landmarks. As I knew the city pretty well already, including the streets of Montmartre, I wasn't too worried about it, but I imagine my friends would have really loved to stay. :-)

What would a city shoot be without at least a little HDR? :-) Dunno, I haven't tried that in quite a while. Also, this time, I'm premiering a new image-processing technique called Exposure Blending. It has basically the same principle as HDR, but achieves the effect much less intrusively, or if you want, without the painting-like effect. See if you can spot those shots. :-)


Notre Dame is very classy, and unlike those posh priests in London with grand robes up their asses, no one was fretting about photography there. The bad thing about this were the myriads of random people discharging one flash after another into the domes... the good thing was that I was able to shoot photos like these without being bothered.


This is the HDR version on this shot, in the next post, I will also upload a more contrasty non-hdr sub-exposed version.

As my camera is still being serviced cause of its shutter failure, I borrowed a generation younger EOS 50D from a friend. I was very satisfied with the camera. It was a nice evolutionary step, especially from the usability/ergonomic point of view... and it never hurts to have more megapixels to crop.

This is a pretty rare photo... those of you familiar with traffic around the Arc surely know why. :-)

To sum things up, it was a wonderful, albeit somewhat costly weekend trip, and I'm looking forward to have more of those. :-) And a good trip needs a good company, so if you'd someday like to join me, leave me a note...