Dedicated to two people who want to see Paree again.

When ah saw thees scene ah thought, "Zees would nert be out of place een Paree. And of course, eet eez much cheaper to get to get to Central than eet eez to get to Gare De Lyon, noh?"

OK, so perhaps it might not have quite the same ambience, especially taking into account the three homeless people just out of frame on my right who were discussing the location of the cops and sniffer dogs who were patrolling the station at the time. (Although upon reflection, that may not be quite as un-Parisian as I first thought.)

I was a bit lucky to get this one; I had gone out to take my PESO at lunch time but had forgotten to put the memory card back in after yesterday's photo. And I didn't have the backpack with me. So when I got back to the office I muttered under my breath, put the spare memory card into the camera and decided to see what I could find that afternoon.

As it turned out, that oversight did me a favour since I think that this is far and away a better image than I would have taken at lunchtime. It started raining as I was on the tram to Central, so when I arrived I walked out to the main entrance and saw the pedestrian crossing. And the steeple in the background. And the bicycle tied to the railing. And the misty rain hitting the roadway. And the whole scene felt very Parisian to me. I therefore decided to put this up to see whether someone wants to save themselves a trip.

I suspect that the answer is "mais noh!"

For those who are interested in the technical aspects, this is a five image HDR merge, ranging from -4 stops (1/8000ths of a second) to + 4 stops (1/40th of a second) in 2 stop intervals. I added a Levels adjustment layer to boost the contrast, and a Black and White adjustment layer to drop out the colour, then used the Black and White adjustment layer's layer mask to bring back the selective colour of the pedestrian crossing sign. The layers were then merged and converted to a Smart Object. After that I knocked it back from a 16 bit to an 8-bit image to allow me to apply a Lighting Effect Smart Filter, using a point light to create a very subtle Parisien vignette.