Selfie at the Eiffel Tower – Paris, France

I moved to the sidewalk, which was much safer, though I didn’t get yesterday’s picture’s direct, symmetrical perspective. You can make out the other crazies (like me) standing in the middle of the street. My wife and I didn’t climb the tower that night. That would be on a subsequent day.

Noticing many people taking selfies with the iconic tower, I hit upon an extreme street photography idea — extreme in the sense that it was dark and technically challenging. Let me explain.

To get both the people in the foreground and the Eiffel Tower background in sharp focus, I set the aperture to a comparably slow f8 in an already dark environment. I used the glow of their smartphone to light their faces. I shot at 1/2 of a second using in-lens stabilization to achieve what I wanted. Miraculously, I got the picture I wanted in a couple of attempts at a reasonable ISO 1000.

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