If you want to appreciate what the word cliché means, go French-native and try to get a creative photo of the Eiffel Tower. Just about every shot you take will look like just about any other. Still, if you’re in Paris, you gotta try. If nothing else you’ll have a nice memory for the family album.

Take a cloud here or there, maybe the lighting is a tad different, but nothing much by the way of originality going for that first shot. So I tried with a super wide angle lens from a — I hoped, unusual — point of view, and tried to make the shot more about light and form, primarily those sweeping, upward curves.

The first try seems okay, but this second one seems to please folks who view it — or so they tell me.

I think the reason it works is because it is recognizable, thanks to the cliché, yet different enough to make people pause and notice that the image doesn’t look like every other Eiffel Tower shot they’ve seen in the store or in a movie. Sometimes by modifying vantage point and perspective, we can overcome a cliché and turn out a successful image.

Following up on the previous Durango in Yellow entry, here are some photos I took during the train ride from Durango to Silverton. A moving train doesn’t necessarily provide the best platform for high quality shots, but keeping the shutter speed sufficiently high and the eye-to-shutter reaction time low, and some nice shots can come of it. Especially in autumn, the sights along the Durango-Silverton line are beautiful.

So far I’ve posted quite a few rather gloomy shots from my recent Kauai trip. While those were captured during the first day there, when stormy weather was making its way through, I did have the chance to catch some glimpses of sun before the harsh midday light.

This first photo comes from Princeville, just on the entrance into Hanalei bay.

Princeville shore

I captured the next three images during a nice stroll along Tunnels beach.

Shoreline steps

Surf and sky

Rock, surf and hills

On a recent trip to Kauai, I had the chance to take the following photos around Hanalei bay. The somewhat stormy weather lent itself to a B&W treatment.

Copyright (c) 2011, Eduardo Suastegui

Click on the image to advance at will

This past weekend, while photographing the Kilauea Lighthouse in Kauai, I had a chance to explore my subject with different compositions. My choices were limited given that my position was more or less fixed atop the lookout above the lighthouse. This made things a tad uncomfortable since I like to explore my subject by moving around and finding different perspectives. Nonetheless, using the zoom on my Sigma 17-50 f2.8 lens, I arrived at the following 3 compositions.

For the first attempt, I zoomed in and left the horizon rather high in the frame. In post-processing, I decided I had too much foreground, and that it detracted when contrasted with the simpler arrangement I would get with a square crop.

For the next shot, I opted for a more traditional thirds arrangement in a 11×14 crop where the sky occupies the top third. Even with its smaller ratio, the sky and its cloudy features loom prominent and provide nice balance against the rocky cliffs, violent surf and lighthouse accent.

In the last frame, I opted for more depth by lowering the aim to include less sky and make the shot more about the foreground and bay below.

For all three of these I selected Black and White processing to focus more attention on the shapes and textures and less in the myriad blue tones in the water and sky. In the end, I don’t think any of these are the perfect shot, but it was sure fun to give it a try.

While at Durango, Colorado this past weekend, I had the chance to chase a double-header of the railroad kind. It turns out that’s the term for two locomotives working in tandem to pull a train whose length and weight requires a bit more pulling power. Here are two shots that caught my fancy.

For the second shot, while other photographers shot from across the way with the sun at their back, I was the lone one who chose to shoot somewhat against the sun. I wanted to achieve the translucent effect that sun beaming through the smoke gives, and knowing I could rely on the D7000′s shadow recovery capabilities at base ISO to bring out detail on the dark near side of the train, I gave it a go. I meant to go back the next day and try it the "proper" way, but I never got around to it. I rather like how the shot turned out in B&W.