Monochrome Cafe Life – Paris, France

I produced several cafe life keepers during this late-night outing but narrowed it down to these three as my favorites. The rain and carrying an umbrella made photography awkward; however, the resulting sparkle from the wet streets made the endeavor worthwhile. You can see the effect in the first and third photographs.

Shooting at night always brings additional challenges, and I often default to a slow shutter speed to reduce the ISO (I usually keep my cameras on Auto ISO) to create the cleanest images. Reducing the shutter with people in the scene is a trade-off since I might get an unintended motion blur.

I made a mistake with this first photograph but lucked out. I reduced the shutter to 1/8 second with an ISO of 400. I was fortunate that everyone came out crisp with no motion blur. I should’ve used a 1/15 second at ISO 800 or even a 1/30 at ISO 1600. An ISO of 1600 would’ve been sufficiently clean. Admittedly, I don’t always check the ISO value as closely as I should.

This photograph’s exposure and setting look reasonable at 1/30 second at ISO 3200. An advantage of black and white is that high ISO noise looks better than in color. 3200 produced a slight grain, which worked well here, though it lacks the wet-street drama of the other photographs.

As long as I’m coming clean about my photography mistakes, I’ll admit I made two in this picture, though I love the resulting image. First, I made the same 1/8 of a second mistake, although the ISO is higher at 640. I also should’ve zoomed in more. I cropped this photo more than I liked to create the desired framing. I could’ve reduced the crop and maintained a higher resolution by zooming in closer.

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