Photography is allowed in the permanent exhibition rooms, but flash photography and lighting
equipment are prohibited. In practical experience, though, I saw many people taking occasional
flash photos with point-and-shoot cameras and these were ignored by the room monitors. I'm sure
the monitors would get more excited if you tried the same thing with a big DSLR, or took an
abundance of flash photos! So, it's time to up the ISO, slap on that fast f1.4~f2 lens, and
utilize whatever image stabilization technologies your camera or lenses allow.
It appeared to me that the primary light source in many of the rooms was daylight coming in through
large windows, and my first few exposures seemed to bear this out. WRONG! As you can see from this
example the room lighting at times created quite a color cast on the subject. Our eyes, of course,
compensate automatically for the "white point" and we don't usually notice such color casts. Note:
I also tried setting the white balance to "Tungsten," but this resulted in a blue cast from the
daylight streaming in through the windows. So there was no happy medium between the standard presets.
So, either adjust your white balance for best results for each subject, set WB to Auto and take
what you get, be prepared to take a custom white balance if your camera allows it, or shoot RAW
and make the WB adjustment later in post-processing (if your camera supports RAW).
Lastly, you're going to go photographic crazy in the Louvre, so be sure to have plenty of space
available on your memory card!