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Nikon D700 F/5.6 1/40s ISO-400 PrAP EV +0.7 62mm |
This is the grocery store which featured in the movie, and ever since it's been overrun by happy snappers hoping, for all I know, to catch a glimpse of Amélie doing her weekly shopping.
Evidence of her passing can be seen in the postcards outside, the posters and the window display of old newspaper clippings. The famous gnomes are also in evidence.
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The original of the picture above |
This gives us the chance to see what can be rescued from the handful of shots I did take which can be seen in this post.
The shot I chose has the postcards nice and sharp and cheeky Amélie fuzzy. In contrast I also had a murky one of things the other way round; a sharp Amélie and a fuzzy set of postcards. In the end, and perhaps counter-intuitively, I went with fuzzy Amélie and sharp cards.

There's a kind of unwritten rule that says our brain is attracted to things which are near, sharp and bright. If you confuse it by mixing these elements it's not sure where to look and doesn't perceive the image as being as coherent as it could be.

Anothe contender is this vertical composition which would have worked OK for the same reasons as the first picture above. There is this niggling feeling in all these shots though that Amélie should actually be sharp, near and bright, as opposed to here where she's all the opposite. But as I said, that's what I had to work with so I'm making the best of a bad job.
This shot includes her name, legibly, at the bottom of the poster, which is an additional identifying element. The problem is still this big bank of bright postcards which tend to dominate and throw the starlet into a secondary role which she's not very happy about.

If I were doing a classic grocery store fruit display shot without the Amélie factor I'd have done it a lot differently to this, with far more fruit and more careful focusing (i.e. more in focus probably). Again, there's a problem with the brightness, well, darkness, of Amélie, which causes problems all over the place.

I've achieved the fuzzy effect by getting in close to the postcards with a fairly wide aperture (F/5.6) which is good enough for this purpose. Keeping the ISO at 400, I was getting dangerously close to a shaky shutter speed.
The basic rule is to have a shutter speed which is at least the same as the length of the lens. In other words, at 62mm here the shutter speed should be at least 1/60 of a second. With a 250mm lens it should be at least 1/250th of a second. This rule of thumb is fairly reliable but of course you still have to do your best to hold the camera as still as possible, it goes without saying...
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* Sab Will runs Photo and Curios Tours in Paris, and also manages a variety of Paris and photography-themed sites and blogs. He writes an illustrated Paris Chronicle every day, runs a Meetup group for Paris lovers, interviews Paris personalities and reviews Paris books (on this blog), and even contributes to the city's street art (shh), so feel free to browse some of the links below and in the right-hand column to find out more about what he gets up to out there...
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