Paris, France, August 2010

Every night on the hour since the Y2K celebration the Eiffel Tower breaks out into a special light show with high intensity, quick-flashing, bluish-white strobe lights all over. It lasts about 5 minutes. The rest of the time it is lit with thousands of amber incandescent lamps, which you can also see here, in addition to the strobes.

Looking southeast from Trocadero Square past the reflecting pool. The gun-like devices to the near left are giant water cannons, which appeared to be out of use during the period we were there.

Straight up into the Tower. Large catch nets used for the Tower restoration put a damper on many of my planned shots, including this one.

The lattice design of the Eiffel Tower is quite strong, and is one of the most efficient shapes in architecture. Though it is 1053 feet high, the Tower only weighs 7300 tons. If you melted down the tower and spread it over the area of its base it would only be 2.36 inches high. Puddled iron, a special, high quality, long-lasting iron was used in the framing. It will likely be there as long as France wants it be. The Tower's deflection rates due to wind and the sun's heat are very small for such a structure.

Looking southwest from the second deck of the Eiffel Tower.

Looking southeast from the Eiffel Tower.

Looking northwest from the Eiffel Tower. The "City of Lights" lives up to its billing on a clear night. In the top center is the Trocadero and the curved Palais De Chaillot, home of the French Naval Museum and other museums.

Notre Dame at dusk, taken from the moving tour boat on the Seine River. It took a few tries to get a photo that was not blurry from motion. I blazed away on continuous shooting mode until the view was gone, hoping to get at least one clear image-one is all I got. The handheld exposure took 1/4 second, focal length was 100 MM, image stabilized. This shot would have never happened with image stabilization technology.

Notre Dame from the sidewalk. We saw this and a lot more on our extra day after the Globus tour was over.

Notre Dame. The trademark flying buttresses (not easily seen in this photo) serve double duty as structural supports for the vaulted ceiling and as roof drain pipes.

Entering Notre Dame. We were told by our tour guide that each of the three main recessed archways has a different shape, size and design-reportedly as a reference to the uncertainties and irregularities of life's journey.

Visitor lines were long but moved quick. We got inside Notre Dame in about 10-15 minutes.

Notre Dame facade. Lots of sculptures high above the street, loaded with meticulous detail.

Delightful detail treats the eyes everywhere you look inside and outside of the Notre Dame Cathedral.

Notre Dame. Photographically balancing the inside light with the sunlight is always tough on a bright day in a stained glass cathedral. The rose window shows up better in the next photo, #16. HDR imaging helps.

This famous rose window in Notre Dame was completed around 1260 A.D. but amazingly it contains nearly all of the original stained glass panels. The biggest threat came not from wars but during a period in history when lavish church art was frowned upon and many European treasures like this were ceremoniously destroyed and replaced by simple designs. Lucky for us, this one survived that movement and all the other unrest from the last 750 years.

Notre Dame.

Inside Notre Dame.

More stained glass from Notre Dame, this time at the prayer room.

It is a long way up to the gothic ceiling inside Notre Dame-100 feet to be exact.

Napoleon's Column.

Street dining is an option at practically every restaurant in Paris.

An old government structure converted into the Mazarin College.

A cable pulley station for the elevators, as seen on the way up the Eiffel Tower from one of the lift cabs.

While we were in Paris the restoration nets were pulled off the right side of the Tower that faces the Seine River. You can see where the letters under the first deck on the right side have been restored, but other letters on the lighter-colored, unrestored left side are hard to read.

The Tower projects a quiet, powerful and comforting presence at night. In fact, the night atmosphere in every city we visited in France and Italy was much more peaceful and "warm" feeling than I expected. Vehicle noise was negligible after 8PM--far different that downtowns of large U.S. cities after hours.

The Sacre Coeur Cathedral in the hillside Montmartre District of Paris, as seen from the Eiffel Tower in a light rain. It is about 5 miles away.

Hotel les Invalides. This telephoto shot from the Eiffel Tower makes it look like the main building is tightly crammed in between other buildings, but look at the next photo to see how wide open the space around it really is.

This is the front side of the Hotel les Invalides complex that faces the Seine River which is still some distance away beyond a long plaza and past the Eiffel Tower.

Built in 1795, this is one if many interesting buildings in the historic Montmartre sector of the city.

Just like Italy, Paris loves plants and wrought iron balconies.

Facade of the Orsay Museum.

We ate in this restaurant in Montmartre, under suggestion of our travel guide. It was good advice.

The weather in the summer makes it easy to decorate your balcony as these Parisians have done.

Paris was full of intricate and fascinating door designs. Most were seen from our bus at speed and could not be captured in time, or were partially blocked by objects that would have created an undesirable composition. I captured this one while we were stopped.

Lafayette Galleries, a beautiful ten story shopping center built in 1912 that is actually all one store. We ate a nice meal in their cafeteria restaurant, but the total lack of name tags on the food items caused some confusion. We would point to the unmarked entree which we wanted and got a long blank stare, thus creating a vibe of "speak French or starve". There were no such barriers anywhere in Italy.

Some churches in Italy and France had some awesome stained glass, but nothing on the scale of the sky dome ceiling of the Lafayette Galleries. It is approximately 100 feet across and very ornate.

Montmartre Section of Paris. The buildings' stone and plaster details show up great in this photo if you select the original size image.

Palace at Versailles, front plaza. This is a panorama of three stitched photos. The entire grounds of the Palace are about 300 times larger than everything you see here.

We only saw a small portion of the Palace, but what we saw was quite detailed.

It is hard to imagine the time it took to create all the ceilings and wall detail of the Palace rooms.

Palace at Versailles ceiling detail in the Venus Drawing Room. To get a feel of the scale here, this section is approximately 15 feet by 10 feet.

The "backyard" of the Palace at Versailles is a little nicer than what most of us have. In its heyday approximately 1400 fountains graced the expansive Palace grounds. Very few remain.

Ceiling of the War Drawing Room, Palace at Versailles. This room is at one end of the Hall of Mirrors.

Some Palace rooms had large windows, making them easier to photograph due to ambient light. Every room we went in was ornate like this one.