Notre Dame

[telophase]

Hello, newbie here.

I spent a couple of days in Paris in December and took my digital camera. I got a few nice pictures, but I think this is the best one of the batch. It's from the interior of Notre Dame Cathedral.

I don't remember any of my camera settings. It was dark enough inside the cathedral that I didn't think any of the photos would come out, especially not this well. I don't know if it comes across in the jpg, but I'm amazed at how sharply in focus the doodads on the chandelier are.

The original is dark and subtle; it may be too dark on various monitors.

 

[LaFoto]

It is a bit dark on my monitor (or it may be my eyes), but I still like it, mostly so because I know of my own difficulties of taking photos inside churches, where there's only so little light. Using a flash is often not allowed, and would destroy the atmosphere, anyway.

 

[telophase]

Thanks. I tried lightening it up a bit in Photoshop to see if I could get a version that would look good on other monitor settings, but it ended up looking so bad on mine that I couldn't stand it.

Notre Dame was full of tourists snapping photos of each other with flash and, more uselessly, trying to take pictures of the immensity of the space inside with cameras whose flashes went off. I wanted to explain to them that their pictures would be full of large black spaces. Even the pictures of each other would be pictures of the subject with a large black space behind them.

Sainte-Chapelle, on the other hand, had nobody using flash in it. (It's a spectacular space made up almost entirely of stained glass.) I took a number of pictures there, but nother spectacular. I think a would have needed a medium-format camera, a tripod, and a remote shutter release to get a decent picture inside Sainte-Chapelle.

 

[LaFoto]

Many of my attempts to take hand-held photos of the inside of churches have failed - and mine have to be hand-held ones for I (no longer - my sister must not know this, it was her birthday present to me once...! ) ...well: don't have a tripod.

I admire my sister for her ability to ever so easily take absolutely clear photos of stained-glass windows, whereas I never succeed in any of that.

 

[telophase]

Most of the rest of my photos in Notre Dame look something like the one here, in other words, ever-so-slightly out of focus. It sort of works on this one, giving it a bit of an ethereal feel. Which it then loses when I name it "Virgin Mary and Thermostat" (or whatever that box is).

Anyway, most of the rest are pretty crummy.