Photo by Daniel Kiechle

To City Hall

I took this photo in November 2008 as I was coming out of the Panthéon in Paris. The large space by the columns is usually crowded with people; on that day, though, I only saw a couple that appeared to be heading towards City Hall, the building across the street. In a flash, I raised the Nikon D300 with the Nikkor DX 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR lens and took the shot. The camera was in aperture-priority mode with f/8 preset, and at ISO 200, this resulted in a shutter speed of 1/250s. The lens was set to 20mm, which comes to 30mm in 35mm equivalence.

Editing notesThe columns needed to be straightened out a bit, and I had to bring down the exposure of the sky of which parts were blown out. I chose to render the photo in black-and-white; to do so, I chose the Kodak Tri-X 400 preset and added a little bit of grain to make it look more like the photos I used to take in the 1970s with my analog camera. I used the Dynamic Contrast filter to bring out some of the details in the scene as well as a variety of other filters. All processing was done in ON1 Photo RAW 2026 Max in June 2026.

NIKON D300
ƒ/8
20mm
ISO 200
1/250 sec

To City Hall

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