Back to Paris, for this view of the Eiffel Tower late, late at night.
The Eiffel Tower is a somewhat complicated subject to photograph, particularly if (like me) you’re hoping to sell some of the pictures you’ve taken of it. After dark, the tower is lit up in a very photogenic way, with fancy light shows at the top of each hour. But apparently the design of these lights is subject to copyright — so you can’t sell any pictures you may take of the tower when they’re turned on.
Go figure.
Anyway, if you wait long enough, the lights get turned off again late at night — only a few red warning lights are left on, to ward off any stray planes in the area. With the lights off, the skyglow from Paris’ city lights provides an interesting backdrop, silhouetting the tower nicely. It probably helped that it had rained earlier in the evening, so a bit of remaining haze helped capture light from town.
I took this picture using a long exposure on a tripod (a Joby ‘Gorillapod SLR,’ a very handy beast on trips). I did nothing fancy, just using ‘Program’ mode on the E-510 with a 2 second delay to avoid blurring from mirror shake. For what it’s worth, the colors in this image are all “natural” — I did no post-processing of the image’s colors, save to do a white balance correction for the lights along the Seine river.
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