On my last trip to Quebec City in 2007, I never had an opportunity to get a good shot of the Fontaine de Tourny, located in front of the Parliament Building. The fountain was brand new at that time — if you can call something new that was built in France in 1855, put in storage in 1960, and relocated to Quebec in 2007. You can find the whole story here.

Anyway, it’s one of those shots that I felt should be in my files because the fountain has such a great story and it is rapidly becoming yet another landmark of this already beautiful city. So… when I went back to Quebec last month, this fountain was high on my shot list.

I captured the above photo on my next-to-last day in town but it’s not the one I originally had in mind. I really wanted a shot that made the fountain the hero and included the Parliament Building as context. I also wanted to shoot at twilight to get the most impact from the color in the scene.

Early on my first free evening in Quebec I set out with my D700 and a tripod and began scouting out my angle. Things are rarely perfect and this day would be no different. It was cloudy, first of all. Not puffy, dramatic clouds but heavy, overall grey clouds that pretty much made for a dead sky. Grey sky, black fountain, stone building. Not a lot of color so far. Still, you never know what will happen and twilight can be magical in any weather. Secondly, I found that half of the Parliament Building was covered in scaffolding and there was a big, lime-green crane right in front. Scaffolding had been everywhere on this visit — even the most prominent element of the Quebec skyline, the Fairmont Le Chateau Frontenac, was getting a new copper roof. The Parliament Building I could work with, though. It just took a little finesse to hide of the bulk of the scaffolding behind trees and hopefully the green crane would disappear as night fell.

Here’s my initial exposure at 7:29 with the composition pretty much established:

A little grey overall but it was early yet and I knew from experience that even grey skies can go cobalt blue for a few, short minutes at twilight. Patience.

A couple of other details for you photographers: I wanted not only the fountain’s water to blur but also the clouds, which were moving fairly quickly. To achieve this before darkness, I stacked my ND filter and my polarizer to cut down as much light as possible. I stopped down mostly around f/11 or f/16 because I find this lens (my Nikkor 17-35mm)  to be sharper in that range than it is all the way down to f/22. That first shot was 5 seconds at f/16.

Here’s a shot from a bit later in the evening around 7:48 — 30 seconds at f/22 (I accepted the loss of sharpness for more blur on this one):

You can start to see the cloud effect in this one. I kept firing a shot off every few minutes, whether it looked like anything had changed or not. I tried some shots with traffic blurring in the background, while on other shots I tried to avoid any cars at all by taking advantage of the nearby traffic signals.

Right around the time of that last shot, this guy shows up:

I have no explanation. A group of guys had wandered up with “protest” signs in French, so I had no idea what they said. Then this guy then strips down to his… bikini (mankini?)… and proceeds to strut around in the fountain while all of his buddies video-taped him. Okay, to be honest, I shot some video on my iPhone as well. What are you supposed to do when something like this happens?!? His friends seem thrilled with his performance and were shouting and cheering and egging him on.

Huh. Luckily he didn’t stay around long enough to ruin any of my long exposures during the fleeting prime light.

This is the kind of thing that could easily distract the amateur photographer. But, as a consummate professional (ahem!), I took it all in stride. I shot my little video to share with friends later, and returned my thoughts to the task at hand. There would be time to ponder this moment later. Strange as it may seem, this isn’t the craziest thing I’ve encountered on a shoot.

I’m starting to get a little color in the sky at this point and there are even occasional cloud breaks and patches of blue. Happily most of the breaks occurred right about sunset time, giving some really nice color for just a brief period of time:

That’s about 8:03, 13 seconds at f/11. The fountain lights were coming on just as the sky was getting nice. I’m liking the balance here. But there’s still more to come. Little by little more lights come on. I notice the floodlights on the front of the parliament building come on extremely green at first but, after they “warm up” a bit, they gradually become a more pleasing tungsten-like color. A good reminder to not pack up too early but to wait and see what happens with time.

During all of this time I played with different apertures and color balances. The latter is mostly just to experiment in-camera. I can easily change the white balance later in Lightroom but it’s interesting to see the changes it makes in such a mixed bag of color temperatures while on location. I tend to like a fluorescent balance on the camera’s screen but I do still tweak it considerably later in Lightroom. Here’s where I was at by 8:24 (30 seconds at f/8):

This is closest to the shot that I had pre-imagined, but I now actually like some of the earlier shots better. Even with the cloudy sky, I knew I had a good shot at getting that cobalt blue color after sunset (which contrasts nicely with the warm artificial light on the building), but the earlier pinks and purples in the sky were an unexpected treat.

In the end, that’s about an hour of actual shoot-time but it yielded quite an array of looks. Some of the early, grey shots might make really dramatic black and whites, while I have three or four pretty different twilight looks that might each appeal to different buyers when these get into the stock libraries.

Not bad for an evening’s work.