Eiffel Tower from Hotel – Paris, France

We paid extra for an Eiffel Tower view from the hotel room, though I knew the tower would be far away. It’s almost a view in name only, but my wife and I enjoyed it for our first time together in Paris. I hoped my 120mm equivalent telephoto would capture an adequate composition, and I wanted a blue hour photo. It was a lot more challenging than expected.

After having our light dinner in the hotel room, I turned my attention to the view. I opted not to burden myself with a tripod, so I had to rely on lens-based image stabilization. I shot several images as blue hour approached. However, as expected, the ISO ramped up, so I countered by slowing down the shutter speed. That only works so far when hand-holding.

I made several images, but most had a small amount of motion blur since I pushed the lens’s stabilization past its capability. I finally caught a moderately sharp image at 1/4 of a second at a 120mm equivalent — for five stops of stabilization. Except, the five minutes it took for that feat had pushed past the optimal blue hour. I considered posting that image but decided on one with lesser sharpness but better blur hour color.

The benefit of these small web posts is that you can’t see the details, which plays to my advantage here. Again, this picture is 120mm equivalent, but at 1/2 of a second — I couldn’t perfect a six-stop image. Perhaps someday, I’ll invest in AI-based sharpening software that would correct the hand movement — a good test for the latest crop of miracle software.

I’ve posted sixty-six blog entries from this Paris trip so far, and believe it or not, they are all from the same day — today’s post caps off the first day in France — just nine more days to go. Mercifully, not all days were this action-packed, so the number of posts per day will vary. However, you can tell that I have much content left from this trip. Like I often do for long series, I’ll break the coverage into sections and jump to other topics before returning.

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