Sunny Street Paris

This photo was taken on the streets of Paris. Before we talk about the editing process, lets look at the framing of the photo. As you can see, the focal point of the photo is the doorway to the coffee shop and it is centered horizontally.

The shadow from the wall is running right down the middle and draws the viewer’s eyes straight down the image. The photo is framed by the walls on either side and the blue sky. There is a beautiful repetition of the windows on the houses which is mirrored by the street lights on the right.

The photo was taken in bright sunlight at midday and you can see how harsh the shadows are. But this was the perfect opportunity to use the Sony A7R and use the incredible dynamic range and all of the 40+ megapixels. The settings used were 1/720s shutter speed at ISO 200 with the incredible G master 35mm lens. The lens is a bit heavy for this street style photography but the results are worth it. Before editing in lightroom, the left side of the image was really dark and shadows had to be brought out by a combination of masking and dodging/burning. If this image was taken on a smaller sensor camera, it would have resulted in a lot of noise in the shadows. The is a slight orange tint applied to all the shadows and the blue sky had a little bit of teal added to get the lovely cinematic look. The teal/orange look has somewhat been overdone in the past few years but it still looks very good for a lot of images.

The entire image was post processed in Abode lightroom only as there was no need to use photoshop. This made the post processing quicker and much more repeatable as there are 100s of lightroom presets available to get this look. With the latest lightroom, you can delete objects from a photo without having to use photoshop and there was a table with two customers outside the coffee shop that was taken out because it was too distracting.

Luckily, the Sun light was coming from the west and there are no issues with glare on the windows and glass on the side wall. Glare is very difficult to get rid of in post and even if you spend a lot of time, it never looks quite right. If you look closely on the right side wall, you can see an arrow pointing right at the coffee shop. This is purely coincidental and a pleasant surprise when we saw the final image.

This is a very busy street and we had to stand around and wait for the best part of an hour to finally capture this image without any people in it. It was worth the wait as it is one of our favorite images from the trip. We did try to go back later in the evening but the street was even busier and made it impossible to take any photos without people ruining it.