A shot from the Musée Nissim de Camondo in Rue de Monceau, Paris. It was the private home of a Parisian banker who was a passionate collector of French furniture and art objects from the eighteenth century. This is one of the staircases. I like the shape of the stairs but felt I needed something more in the image. Visitors were wandering up and down the stairs and so I support my camera on the handrail at the top of the stairs and waiting for people to fill the gaps. I tried various shutter speeds and decide that 1/2s was going to give me the right amount of blur. I really wanted two people in the appropriate places but had to shoot them individually and combine them in Photoshop.
I liked the colours and patterns of the houses stacked up on the slopes at Villefranche in the south of France. I used BuzzPro to take some detail out of the buildings (simplify) and a mild pen-and-ink effect to create this painterly impression.
Near the Gare du Nord, these restaurants seemed ablaze with colour and typify the buzz of Paris with eating on the street at almost any time of the year.
A typical Provence scene but with a little enhancement to make it a little pen-and-ink like. It looks better as a print than it does on screen.
These are the olive trees found in Renoir’s garden at Les Collettes in Cagnes sur Mer near Nice in France. The estate, with its picturesque farmhouse, its groves of olive and orange trees, and the views it afforded of the hilly countryside, provided the artist with inspiration for his later landscapes. This image has been softened and looks quite painterly when printed on a textured watercolour paper.
Cathédrale Sainte-Croix d’Orléans is a Gothic catholic cathedral in the city of Orléans, France. It is the seat of the Bishop of Orléans and it was built from 1278 to 1329 and 1601-1829 (after partial destruction in 1568).
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The Gare du Nord is the busiest railway station in Europe handling around 190 million passengers per year. It handles trains to Northern France, as well as to various international destinations such as Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. The station complex was designed by French architect Jacques Hittorff and built between 1861 and 1864. It is situated in the 10th arrondissement of Paris.
The front façade of the Gare du Nord in Paris is adorned with a number of impressive sculptures, twenty in all. Eight of these crown the cornice line and represent international places (Paris is placed in the centre), and twelve further sculptures represent northern French cities, aligned on the lower façade.
I have a number of shots taken in and around the Gare du Nord in Paris. I quite like images as the light goes down and the buildings are illuminated by artifical light.