I have been fortunate enough to have access to several different types of equipment over the years, which I've used to take pictures for my site.

Almost all the photos on my site were taken on film, since I‘ve abandoned digital photography for the most part, after trying it and finding it somewhat wanting in several respects (digital is great for Web pictures, but not good enough for prints or for publication licensing). Most of the photos now on the site were taken using Nikon and Leica professional 35mm cameras and lenses; a very small number were taken using Hasselblad medium-format equipment. A few were taken with some other cameras—such as my tiny but wonderful Yashica T5 point-and-shoot (film) camera, which is blessed with its own tiny Zeiss lens—or even a disposable film camera.

All of these images were scanned directly from the original negatives or transparencies using Nikon film scanners.

Most of the remaining digital photos in my gallery were taken with a Nikon COOLPIX 950 digital camera. This camera was the state of the art in its time; there are fancier digital cameras now, but since I have mostly abandoned digital photography for now, I have not upgraded to anything more recent—and the COOLPIX does a great job. A few of the photos in the gallery (the oldest among them) were taken with a Kodak DC120 digital camera, of the generation preceding that of the COOLPIX; they are slowly being phased out as I regularly update photos; the DC120 pictures are noticeably fuzzy, but the colors are very faithful. Nowadays, I only shoot digital for photos that I know will never be used anywhere except on my Web site, or for commissioned work when speed is more important than image quality.

I have used a lot of miscellaneous equipment over the years, including a number of tripods (Gitzo, Manfrotto, Arca-Swiss, large and small) that I've used for night shots, a spot meter (Minolta) and an incident meter (Sekonic), and various odds and ends, like loupes, gray cards, a cable release, filters, etc.

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I've photographed some of the most popular landmarks in the city dozens and even (in the case of the Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame Cathedral, the two most popular photo groups on the site) hundreds of times.

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If there is something you’d like to see added to the gallery and you think it might be of interest to all, let me know, and I'll consider it (no guarantees).

I also have easily a thousand or more photos that I just haven't had time to add to the gallery yet, and many thousands of others that I don't have space to add.

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Another good place for development is the FNAC, a chain of stores with large photo departments, including (usually) labs. They have a store open until midnight on the Champs, too.

If I absolutely must have a “pro” lab do the work (which is required for, say, medium-format shots, since the one-hour places cannot do 120 express), I usually go to Picto, a very reputable and very pricey lab with several locations in Paris (one of which is open seven days a week). They are slow with prints and more expensive, but they can do anything you want, any way you want, for a price. They do express work on C-41 and E-6 for both 135 and 120 film, which is nice. I use them for my paid assignments, also, unless the customer objects to the expense.

I develop my black-and-white films myself (only the negatives, since I scan directly from film), if it's not urgent, particularly for cases requiring “weird” development, such as Kodak Technical Pan film.

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Original conventional film photographs are taken by yours truly with a variety of professional cameras and lenses (usually professional equipment, where possible). I have the slides or negatives developed by a good one-hour or pro lab (or I develop them myself, if they are black-and-white), then I scan them on a dedicated film scanner. I check color balance and gamma in Photoshop and reduce the very large scans to something that will fit comfortably on my site (some of the original scans for photos on the site would cover a wall if printed at their original size). Most of the remaining Photoshop processing is otherwise similar to what I do for the digital photos.

I copy digital photos directly from the Compact Flash cards on which the digital cameras record them. The CP950 images are 1600x1200 pixels in size, and require about 5.5 megabytes of disk space. (For comparison, some of the digital images from my film work are 500 megabytes in size!) I downsample both to something that will just about fill an 800x600-pixel computer display, then save them on the site in JPEG format, with a moderate amount of compression. This gets them down to about 150-250 KB in size for the large versions, and about one-fifth that size for the small versions. I do this to minimize download time, to make it easier to fit the images on the screen, and to make the true resolution of the image more closely match the definition used for it. The larger versions are always of better quality than the smaller versions (with more gentle compression, in particular), but the smaller versions load a lot faster for visitors with slow links.

In many cases, I also crop images, run them through a quick unsharp mask to emphasize detail, and occasionally rotate them slightly, before uploading them to the site. In the olden days, all the larger versions of the pictures were 766x514 pixels (the original size provided by the DC50 that I once used), including an added five-pixel border, but I am now individualizing image sizes and using a one-pixel keyline border instead. The small versions are typically half the size of the large versions (in linear pixels), and about 80% smaller in file size.

The original photos as they come from the camera are always of considerably better quality than what you see on my site, because of the above “lab” processing (particularly the compression and downsampling).

All of the photos generally have the colors, brightness, and contrast tweaked to make them optimal for web display. Digital and film photos require about equal amounts of tweaking, but not always of the same kind. This tweaking is not enhancement; my goal is to make the image appear in the browser exactly as it did in real life when I took the shot, for better or for worse. Ideally, you should be able to stand on the spot where I took a picture, and what you see will look to you exactly as it did on my Web site (and this ideal is actually attained in some cases).

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Besides, asking permission is a good habit to get into, particularly for students, who spend a lot of time surfing the Web looking for material for reports and things.

For detailed information on my image licensing policies, see the Image Licensing section of my site, or just contact me.

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If you have no idea what I’m talking about in the above paragraph, chances are that the numbers wouldn’t be of any use to you anyway, so don’t worry about it.

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• Fujichrome Provia 100F: a superb color reversal (slide) film, which is my current favorite for all around use. Very sharp, almost invisible grain, fairly saturated, good color rendition, and no reciprocity failure with good rendering of artificial light sources, which makes it handy for night shots. Virtually all the color images on my site were shot on Provia. It's great.
• Fujichrome Provia 400F: I use this in place of Provia 100F for very low-light shots. It's a bit grainier than Provia 100F and noticeably softer, with a bit more saturation, but it is still the best high-speed slide film around (not that there's a lot of competition at ISO 400).
• Kodak Portra 800: an amazingly fine-grained (for its speed) color negative (print) film, which I use for low-light situations that would be awkward to photograph using Provia, such as outdoor nighttime shots (when I work handheld), and things like indoor event photography (fashion shows and the like). Like all the Portra family of films, it scans well and renders artificial light sources quite nicely.
• Fujichrome Velvia: a legendary transparency film, known for its very vivid, almost surreal colors and strong contrast. It is a favorite of landscape and postcard photographers for these reasons. I use it only occasionally, mainly because it is slow (that is, not very sensitive to light—it's only ISO 50) and somewhat difficult to scan successfully because of its contrast. Still a beautiful film overall, though. The bluest skies you‘ve ever seen are on Velvia, not in Seattle.
• Fujichrome Astia: a very nice transparency film that works extremely well for portraits. I use it when I'm going to be taking pictures of people primarily (without elaborate make-up) … portraits, in other words. It's less saturated and contrasty than Provia and seems to be balanced specifically to guarantee the best possible skin tones.
• Kodak Tri-X Pan 400: an enduring standard in black-and-white negative films, used by photojournalists and just about everyone else for many decades, and still just as popular today (although deadline photojournalists themselves are shooting digital in most industrialized countries now). I use it for “artistic” black-and-white shots, or quick street scenes, and I usually develop it (and all other B&W films I use) myself (to reduce contrast and provide finer grain). A very nice film, for B&W work. I use the so-called professional emulsion (TXP) for medium-format work with Tri-X, and it is even nicer (although the difference is small). I'd love to see a version of Tri-X with all the same characteristics as the current one but with the grain and resolution of Portra 400BW or even Tech Pan, but I'm not holding my breath.
• Kodak Technical Pan: a bizarre but wonderful black-and-white film that holds the distinction of being the sharpest, finest-grained film in the world. I develop it myself because it requires bizarre development, too. I use it for black-and-white photographs where sharpness is important, such as in the black-and-white image of the facade of Notre-Dame that I make available to students and other researchers. The way it handles light is interesting as well; it has a look to it that nothing else can match. Under good conditions in MF work, this film can resolve more than half a billion pixels (500 megapixels) per image (yes, you read correctly!), which is more than just about any scanner or lens can match, and about one hundred times more than a good digital camera. Kodak, in its infinite stupidity, has stopped producing this film, but I still have a few rolls lurking around somewhere.
• Kodak T-Max 400 and 100: fine-grained black-and-white films that I use when the grain in Tri-X starts to irritate me. They are more sensitive to red than Tri-X and seem to give blander treatment of light as a result (if that's what it is), but still nice films.
• Kodak T-Max P3200: I use this for nighttime street shots in very low light, exposing it at EI 1250 to limit grain. It does a very nice job when used that way.
• Kodak Portra 400BW is a C-41 (chromogenic) black-and-white film with incredibly fine grain that reminds one of Technical Pan. However, it's still a very fast film (ISO 400) and it can be developed by any one-hour lab, since it is C-41 (just like ordinary color films). I use this film increasingly for black-and-white work when I don't want grain and I don't have enough time or light to shoot on Technical Pan. This film allows some types of black-and-white handheld night shots that would be just about impossible to get any other way. It also renders some types of scenes beautifully, including night scenes. Kodak has stopped producing this film, too (can't they do anything right?). to scan in some cases. Low grain and high resolution, too.

For digital photographs, I don't use film at all, of course, since digital cameras capture images electronically. But I don't shoot digitally very much these days.

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For a very complete treatment of this problem and the ways in which you can fix it, see my essay, Colors, Pixels, and Your Computer Monitor, in the Various Documents section of my site.

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Yes, usually. Contact me for complete details.

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(There are a handful of exceptions, all in the Notre-Dame subgallery. The photos taken in the towers of the cathedral have been digitally retouched to remove the huge, ugly web of cables that completely encloses visitors to the towers, because it is so all-encompassing that it's practically impossible to see how anything actually looks in the towers without removing those cables. You can see the cables in the other shots of the cathedral from the ground—look at the walkways up around the towers.)

In fact, Paris is even prettier in real life; you can only capture so much with a camera. It’s one thing to look at a picture of the Eiffel Tower, but quite a different experience to put out your hand and lean against it!

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I didn't know who Atget was when I first started photographing Paris, but I do know about him now, and his work and my work do look very similar in a number of ways (at least with respect to photos of Paris). He called himself a documentary photographer, and so do I, when I'm photographing the city. Apparently we both love the city and love to take pictures of it, and neither of us has ever felt any need to put any heavy artistic spin on our photos, so they tend to truly document the city as it looks. Some of his photos are practically identical to mine, except that they were taken a hundred years earlier. Parts of the city look completely different now (such as the area around the Eiffel Tower—the only thing there now that was there a hundred years ago is the tower itself), and other parts of the city haven't changed at all. It's interesting to compare.

Atget seemed to consider his work documentation, not art, and I agree. I think of my own pictures of Paris in the same way. The art is in the city; all I do is capture it on film so that it can be shared with people who live elsewhere in the world.

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