HDR photo of Notre Dame de Paris, taken around midnight from Pont de la Tournelle.

My cousin and her fiancée came to visit from Australia last week and I spent the day with them. I had taken my camera gear with me as we were planning to go shoot that evening. But we ended up going to an amazing restaurant (which I recommend) called “La Rotisserie du Beaujolais” which is right beside the famous Tour d’Argent.

On the way home we saw Notre Dame from the Bridge and I had to stop to shoot, finally I was doing HDR again!

I shot this at midnight on a cloudy but windy night, as the clouds were being blown away it created a line in the background with clear sky and the clouds. I added some blue in the sky in post production to give it a nicer feel.

As I could not get an overexposed shot for the HDR, Photomatix didn’t do a good job. So I “HDR’d” this by hand by taking three shots and masking out parts from each to compose this photo. Originally it was 16mm focal length but I cropped it as there was too much empty space in the foreground so it’s less now. The exposure time on the right is wrong, this was a 30 second exposure for the “light” photo.

Well I hope you like it too.

TIP: I noticed that some photographers don’t shoot landscapes on cloudy evenings. Now here’s a little advice for everyone about the “blue hour”. No matter if it is cloudy or sunny you will have a “blue hour” well it’s not really an hour. On a cloudy evening it will only last about 20 minutes, maybe a little more. About 10-20 minutes after the sun has gone down behind the horizon you will have that blue moment where the sky and everything sort of glowing blue. My Arc de Triomphe HDR photo was taken on a cloudy evening. So don’t think a cloudy evening is wasted – you’ll often get a much better texture in the sky when it’s cloudy.

04 Jul This entry was published on July 4, 2010 at 8:19 pm. It’s filed under Bridge, Buildings, HDR, Landscape, Monument, night photo, Nikon D300, Paris, Parisian Classic, photography, Seine and tagged Building, Buildings, HDR, night, nikon d300, Notre Dame de Paris, Paris, photography, photos, river, Seine, summer, water. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.