Paris: Monuments & Statues

Thanks to frequent flyer miles, a little extra cash, and relatives willing to watch our kids and dogs for a week I was blessed with the opportunity to visit Paris with Danelle to celebrate our 24th wedding anniversary. She actually lived there for four years as a young child when IBM transferred her dad there, so it was a bit of a homecoming for her.

This was not a photo trip, but a trip for spending time together. Urban photography isn't my specialty anyway. But in a city as beautiful as Paris, some pictures still had to be taken.  So I only brought one camera body and lens. :)

We elected not to wait in the lines or spend the money to go up the Eiffel Tower.  But we still went down to it just for the experience.  It's a very imposing structure up close, which this angle illustrates to some extent.

Oddly, I was awake before sunrise after our first night.  Thanks to the wonders of jet lag we didn't get up before 10 a.m. any other day.  So I took advantage of the situation to head out in hopes of a sunrise shot of the tower.  While the clouds weren't especially thick, they were too close to the horizon to allow really vibrant color.  The effect was instead more pastel in nature.

Sunset wasn't until just before 10 p.m.  Even when the sky finally got truly dark around 11 p.m., there was still a huge crowd out to see the tower all lit up.

Sunrise in The Trocadero, with the statue of Marshal Foch silhouetted at left.

A gilded bronze statue of Joan of Arc stands in the Place des Pyramides.  I wish I'd shifted my angle just slightly to get some more visual separation between the statue and the building in the background.

Speaking of gilded, the artwork adorning the Paris Opera House is spectacular.

I went out for one sunset shoot, choosing the Arc de Triomphe for the location.  The sky gave a more colorful show than it had for my earlier sunrise excursion.

I shifted position as sunset turned to twilight, and liked what I was able to get once the monument was lit.  I brought my tripod along for just these types of situations.

This is just a lamppost.  A lamppost in the Place de la Concorde, and quite possibly the most ornate lamppost in the world.  But a lamppost nonetheless.

Now that the facepalm has become a gesture of cultural notoriety, this statue of Cain in the Jardins de Tuileries has likely received a bump in its popularity.

More to come!