How and Why
While exploring the views of the Eiffel Tower from the Trocadéro I eyed up the miniature souvenir versions on sale by numerous guys walking around trying to make a sale. I realised I could create a composition showing the strong contrast between the tower and its likeness in miniature. One of the guys selling the miniatures was leaning on this wall holding the key-rings on a loop of wire. I asked him if I could take a photograph and he obligingly laid the bunch of miniature towers on the wall allowing me a few seconds to frame and shoot.
I had to contort my body position to get the composition I was after and in doing so couldn't get my eye flush with the viewfinder, unable to get a view of the whole finder. I manually focussed on the front most key-ring and made sure that it was sharp. I checked that depth of field would be sufficient to hold the (real) Eiffel Tower in a recognisable form, checked composition and made three exposures. During all this I neglected the most important aspect of the framing - keeping the tower upright and when I reviewed the shots I instantly saw that the tower was not straight. I've rotated the image for this final version and in doing so the foreground key-rings have been clipped out of the edge of the frame.
So...another lesson learned - must apply caution when its not easy to see the whole of the viewfinder and a few more seconds spent checking the scene is level could be the difference between a successful image and a failure! I'm still happy with the end result and the image is as I visualised it. From here I went to explore the Eiffel Tower itself and made my favourite image of the trip.
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