Left the office even later than last nite. Went straight to the hotel ‘cuz getting up early tomorrow (to go to Luxemburg see how Steppi is doing), but took the time to add to the night photography theme on my way to the subway station.

The station is at the end of the concrete slab that runs between all the office buildings here, where the pedestrians get to walk around while the cars race below in sodium-lit tunnels… and from there, like from the stern of a giant ship of glass and steel steaming away from the older streets of Paris, you can see a long wake of light with the Arc de Triomphe at the end.

The French being the French, the smokestacks of the ship are all decorated, giant tubes of steel helping to draw exhaust out of the bowels of La Defense… even sounds like a warship, no? This one is covered with parallel tubes of various diameters and each painted with various pastel colours Benetton would not disown.

By the time I made it to the centre of town from the business district to meet up with Chloe & BF for dinner, it was night.

So still no daylight shots today…

You’d be forgiven for thinking I’m doing this on purpose.

For the (ex or current) Parisians, we met at the Pompidou centre, and I got there a little early, so whipped out the camera and tried to see what I could do with the new lens in such a vast urban space.

I wasn’t disappointed.

First of, I noticed a knot of street artists, sketching away under a couple streetlights.

One of them was working from a photograph which the customer had brought on a laptop, and well, it seemed appropriate to try to capture him on electron, you know?

I backed up, looked in the viewfinder, backed up some more, looked again, backed up, looked, etc… until I was a generous twenty steps away from him. There was no way he was going to spot me, and the only difficulty was shooting past the passers-by. The plaza slopes down fairly steeply so by then I was also below the level of the laptop, which worked out nicely, I think.

That’s one of the nice things about the long focal length (which is even enhanced, for once, by the cropped sensor), is how far you can be from the action.

In fact, if you can find the space to really give your subject some distance, you get a very broad, unwarped perspective of the scene which is just impossible with a wide-angle lens. I had one of those little aha moments when something you should know suddenly jumps from book-learning to partical application, in fact, when I took the next picture, which I like to call ‘Tail Wags Man‘ for some reason.

There is a certain wide ‘look’ on some pictures which I’ve been yearning for, and it can’t be done with a wide-angle lens… you can only do it by stepping back… way back, with a long focal length.

Length matters, who knew?

You’ll have noticed the two pictures are fairly sharp for handheld night shots. At night, at f/2.8 and ISO 1600, good street lighting will give you shooting speeds of almost 1/50s or 1/80s, which is decent, but with the 150mm cropped to 225mm, you need a steady hand when you got lazy and left the tripod at the hotel that morning… or you can take several shots and get lucky.

I got really lucky with the next one, of the famous external escalators on the museum’s facade, and it gives an idea of what I could have done with my tripod, but with some nasty hi-speed noise added to make me feel like an ass.

All the blurring seen here is due to the fact that I still don’t know how to reduce the size on a picture and not get blurry results. There is also a piece of repair or cleaning equipement in front, on the lower half…

Here is a pixel-for-pixel detail in the middle:

Anyhoo, we went to get some sushi when the love birds show up and I was forcefully reminded how American I’m getting when the smoke in the place really bothered me, despite the fact that it was by no means smoky in there, by my standards of a year ago.

BF smokes, so it rapidly became a moot point, and I took the opportunity to take some shots of the ashtray… since the light was not right for shots of the sashimi. (shudder)

UPDATE: Forgot to mention that this lens, like all macros, needs aperture compensation as you focus closer. At minimum distance (i.e. 1:1 magnification), you lose two stops. At a field of view a couple inches wide, you lose about one stop… so the ashtray shot is really something like an f/4 @ 1/80s ISO 1600.

Didn’t make it to the hotel until after dark so still no photomacrography at f/2.8 and ISO 200, sorry.

A quick shot of Parisian streets out the window and I’m off to bed for what I hope will be a good night’s sleep.

Oh, perhaps you were wondering what this baby can do when it’s not in macro mode?

The new lens got here 30 minutes before the taxi arrived to take me to the airport, so my first foray into photomacrography lit upon the fauna of the Continental Airline lounge: discarded wrappers of single-serving crackers… with their arcane ingredients list.

This image is slightly cropped from the original (about half the full width):

The same (har, har) cropped further to get to 100% or pixel for pixel:

The crackers are about an inch and a half long, to give you an idea of the size… the lens was almost at 1:1 magnification for this shot, so the full photo covered about an inch wide on the wrapper.

Oh, I played with the levels because frankly the light sucks here, this was taken at ISO 1600, and I have not applied any sharpening. Tomorrow I’ll try to show you what a well-lit, ISO 200 shot looks like with no messing around at all.