How I Got That Shot - Barcelona Restaurant, Spain

A Barcelona restaurant prepares for a weekend night of diners, by Joel Addams/Aurora Photos

RESTAURANT IN BARCELONA, SPAIN

Touted as one of the most international cities in the world, Barcelona, Spain continues to capture my attention for a variety of reasons:  the art, the food (fresh fish), and the photography.  This shot was taken on a Saturday night as people started flooding the streets of the city known for its nightlife.  I was driving with a friend of mine, and we were thoroughly lost in the one-way streets and pedestrian areas.  Just for a second, I noticed a blaze of orange and red glow down an alley way and made a mental note of where it was.  We had to park some distance away, and walked back with my camera bag to photograph the scene of this restaurant with a server setting up for the night.  She didn’t notice me as I had on a 70-200 mm lens, and I stood more in the dark, as she was in the lighted area.  I went to 200 mm not only to crop the scene into the area that I thought was the most interesting, but also to give that little compression of the scene.  I chose f/8 but in retrospect should have opened the lens a bit more to 5.6 or even 4.  My choice let the shutter stay open a bit too long, which made the movement of the server blur.  I think that was OK to do, but I did increase my ISO a bit to 200 to compensate.  (The noise on the old 5D was worse than its younger brother, the 5D Mark II.) It worked out OK in the end, and the Image Stabilization saved me as I had to handhold the camera.  The only very mysterious part of the photograph is the very daunting and quite frightening image of a person walking behind the scene.  At 100%, this appears to be a cloaked figure with an almost non-human face!  This is surely just an artifact of the blur of motion from the individual, but it makes you wonder what’s lurking around Barcelona!

Camera: Canon 5D
Lens: 70-200mm lens at 200 mm
Settings: ISO200, f/8, 0.8 seconds
Filters:  None
Other: Handheld with Image Stabilization (IS) on.

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