Some more transportation photos. In France, they have the national rail network, which has two grades of TGV-class trains: the long-distance, high speed trains (the one that goes from Paris to Marseilles in 3 hours) and the not-so-fast trains that stop more places. They also have regional trains that connect the smaller cities and larger towns, and then around Paris there are the RER trains that run on a separate set of tracks from the Metro, but it interfaces with and extends the Metro network.
You’ve already seen my TGV photos. Here is one of the regional trains at the station in Chalon, on the Burgundy province network.
Wouldn’t it be cool to commute on a train like that every day?
Here’s another view of that train, from the platform at Chalon. You can see the name of the station on the sign under the awning over the platform.
Although not specifically depicting trains, I had to include this shot here, as it was in plain view from the platform of the Dijon rail station. If you watched tv in the US between the 1970s to 1990s, this will probably tickle your funny bone.
Finally, two more transportation images that have nothing whatsoever to do with trains, but instead are bicycle related. France is bike-infatuated, after all it is the home of the Tour De France. Will this be the new look on next year’s Tour?
Some would say cycling shorts can’t go away fast enough as a fashion piece; I think they should stay, as they prevent both chafing and blindness.
A very different take on bike-based transportation is this, spotted at the plaza in front of Notre Dame:
A very different, less aerodynamic sense of fashion dominates this cyclists ensemble. Equal risk of putting out someone’s eye, but from a totally different cause.
There is now a viewing platform in the square in front of Notre Dame which makes for a great venue to watch the fire spinners and other street performers, and a nice vantage point to view the facade, but it does present an unique challenge for photographing the entire building – you can’t get far enough back to get the whole facade including the towers in one frame without using an extreme wide-angle lens and introducing lots of distortion. So second-best option was this – shoot in two frames and line them up. It ALMOST worked, but you still get some keystoning from having to shoot up to get the towers.
Just a quick one-off of a very red, vibrant fire hydrant in Chalon-sur-Saone. It fits well within my series of ordinary objects, and it has a very sculptural quality to it.
We’ll start with the Louvre museum. Here are some photos of the building itself. The Pyramid, the glass entrance structure that opens to the underground entrance lobby, is fascinating in itself for the geometry it creates and the possibilities for abstraction, and for the clash of modernity against 18th and 19th century architectural sensibilities that hallmark the rest of the building.
The Pyramid, from belowPyramid, Boy
Under the pyramid there is a vast entrance plaza with a huge spiral stairs. In the center of the spiral stairs is the accessibility elevator, a cylinder that rises and falls to transport people to and from the plaza above, and looks like it should be a stage set from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Spiral Stair, Under the Pyramid
The contrast, a Napoleonic-era entrance ramp and doors (see the N’s in the frieze above the windows and doors). This is empty because the courtyard is closed to the public and filled with construction equipment.
Courtyard, Louvre
As you can see, the Louvre is a VERY busy museum. I don’t know if it is the most visited art museum in the world or not (I think it is), but it also has to be one of the largest if not the largest. I really only saw parts of one wing of the museum (there are three), and you could easily spend a half a day in there every day for a month and still not see everything.
The Grand GalleryVisitors, Napoleon crowns Josephine
The grand gallery is where the Italian Renaissance masterworks are held – the three non-Mona Lisa DaVincis are here, along with the Caravaggios – highlights of the collection that most interested me.
In the section with the 19th century French paintings, there was a painter with his easel set up, copying the famous painting of the cavalryman in the bearskin hat. I couldn’t resist taking this shot as much because of the “no photography” sign he had on his easel. I’ll justify it by saying that I think it had more to do with not wanting to be disturbed by flashes popping than anything else.
Copyist, Louvre
The Louvre has perhaps the very best collection of Michelangelo’s sculpture outside of Italy. Two of the Medici tomb sculptures are in the sculpture gallery, and are of intense interest to me because they are part of the “unfinished” pieces in style. There is still significant debate as to whether the “unfinished” pieces are in fact unfinished or if their appearance is exactly what Michelangelo intended. They are called “unfinished” because they have coarse textures in parts and tool marks are prominent over significant portions of the pieces, to the point that some portions of the pieces are in fact only roughed-in forms without complete features.
Well, Chalon-sur-Saone is NOT in Paris, obviously. But I did go there as part of this trip. Chalon is a small city on the banks of the Saone (pronounced Son) river, about 130 kilometers from the Swiss border. The reason for the visit was not to take a river cruise (Chalon is the departure point for many river cruises as the Saone feeds into the Rhone river at Lyons and from there flows to the Mediterranean) but to visit the birthplace of photography. But didn’t Louis Daguerre invent it in Paris in 1839? No. Nicephore Niepce (pronounced Knee-eps) actually discovered the very first viable photographic process in 1822 when he was able to create photogravure etchings. By 1825 he was working with a process he called “heliography” involving coating bitumen of Judea dissolved in lavender oil on pewter plates. It was fine for mechanical reproduction of static subjects but not terribly useful for anything else, as his exposure times ran longer than eight hours. In the early 1830s he collaborated with Daguerre on developing an improved process. Alas, he died in 1833, and was not able to see the fruition of his labors.
Today’s post from Chalon covers the black-and-white photos I took. Chalon is more than river cruises and dead inventors – the town dates back to Roman times, and although little visible remains of its Roman years, the medieval core of the city is still very visible and accessible. The square in front of the cathedral features half-timbered buildings from the 14th century.
Patron Saint Statue, Chalon
The cathedral in Chalon may look somewhat newer – the facade took heavy damage and was restored in the 19th century, but parts of the structure date back to the 8th.
Thinking of how things change, here we have very clear evidence – in the 19th century there was a major reformation of the way street addresses were indicated. Previously, instead of having odd numbered houses on one side of the street and evens on the other, the numbers would go up sequentially on one side of a street and when they reached the end of the street, they’d turn around and keep going up until they got to the beginning, so it was possible to have number 3 in the same block as number 252, which was extremely confusing. Also, with all the turmoil in France from the 1780s until the 1880s, streets were frequently re-named. This intersection shows what were once Rue Voltaire and Rue Comerce are now Rue du Pont and Rue du Chatelet.
Speculum Vitae, Chalon
Number 9 is a good example – I don’t know what the original street number was, but the 9 is a typical blue and white enamel-on-metal plaque from the late 19th/early 20th century. The house, obviously, dates to 1550.
Number 9, circa 1550
Rue de L’Oratorie is another example. This is the street on which Niepce was born; his house is behind me, at modern #15. However, there is a plaque on the wall of the courtyard that leads to Rue de L’Oratorie which says the Niepce birth home is at #9. THe plaque indicating the location of the home was placed before the address reformation, so you can imagine my confusion when looking for #9 and not finding it at all! Fortunately Rue de L’Oratorie is only really 2 blocks long, and there is a second sign in the rue on the house itself. I don’t have photos of the house taken with the Rolleiflex because it’s quite nondescript and the rue itself is rather narrow at that end, making it hard to photograph more than a bit of a wall. I do have photos on my iPhone of the signs that I’ll post with the color images later.
Rue de L’Oratorie, Chalon
These are views of the Tour Saudon, a 14th century tower house right around the corner from Niepce’s birthplace.
Tour Saudon, GateTour Saudon, Rue de L’Oratorie
Also on the Rue de L’Oratorie, this house has a bridge connecting its two halves on each side of the street.
As previously mentioned, I didn’t have much need for automotive transportation in France. But I did get to see some very cool cars at both extremes of the spectrum.
A Ferrari:
With its yellow brake calipers:
A Mercedes convertible in matte finish paint:
And at the opposite end of the form-vs-function/performance-vs-economy spectrum, there were the Lib’aire electric car sharing cars:
And this funky Renault tandem in-line two seater that could park on the sidewalk it was so narrow.
Here are more images from Versailles, these from the town, not just the palace.
These were from a pair of antique shops in the town. The first one specialized in architectural antiques, the other in books and clocks. There was a pair of antique enlargers in the bookstore, along with some really neat clocks. The tall clock was actually complete, and the price was very reasonable (around 200 euros), but of course shipping it home would have cost more than the clock was worth when restored!
I’m very ambivalent about Versailles. I’m glad I went to see it but given what I know now, there are better times to go, like the dead of winter on a weekday, not a Sunday in tourist season. There were so many people it was all you could do to peek at the various rooms, let alone actually read the signage or look at anything in depth.
Tourists as a class are becoming more and more obnoxious especially with the advent of camera-enabled mobile devices. Phones are bad enough, but really, could you think for a moment about the effect on everyone else trying to see something when you hold your iPad over your head to take a picture?? Or even when you increase your cubic volume by splaying your elbows out to steady it while composing??? It’s beyond narcissistic.
Anyway… To find a bright spot in that cloud, the difficulty in photographing whole rooms made me pay attention to details in the main spaces, like window levers and curtain hooks.
Here are a couple of shots of the hall of mirrors. It was so crowded that it was hard to photograph, aggravated by the aforementioned phones and tablets being hoisted aloft to see over the crowd. So I photographed the chandeliers instead.
Having a slow news day at the office, I thought I’d post some of the stuff from my iPhone that I shot in Paris. Here’s a very short video clip I took of a fire spinner in front of Notre Dame cathedral using fireworks as part of his act.
My apologies for the very long delay in writing. Did you all miss me? Part of it was just a general busy-ness and part of it was that I was traveling to Paris for ten days, then waiting for my color film to come back from the lab, and processing and scanning my black-and-white work. Paris was a blast – I have to say it was an orgy of great food – I did not have a single bad meal, or even a humdrum one, in the entire 10 days. Well, ok, the breakfast at the airport on the day of the return flight was, well, airport food, but that doesn’t really count. I’d say the meals on Air France made up for it. I’ll save the rest of the food chat for another post – I took pictures of most of my meals.
I took only one camera with me on this trip, the Rolleiflex. It has only one focal length, and is entirely manual. I know to some folks, shooting their entire vacation with a normal lens would be heresy. I found that in actuality, there were perhaps a half-dozen photos that I took that in retrospect would have been better with a different focal length, and another half-dozen to ten that I didn’t take because they wouldn’t work with the focal length I had. This out of almost 400 frames (33 rolls of 120, 12 frames/roll). I kept my film palette largely restricted to two films – Kodak Ektar 100 for color (with two exceptions) and Tri-X for black-and-white. I did make the mistake of dragging along with me a whole bunch of additional film that I didn’t need to bring (way too much alternative black-and-white film, like some Ilford Pan-F and FP4+). The color exceptions were some Portra 160 for long night-time exposures and some Portra 800 for low-light where I could only hand-hold the camera.
I’ll start this series of posts off with a pair of highlights: the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame Cathedral.
The Eiffel Tower:
Eiffel Tower Shadow, Clouds
This was a happy catch. I saw the shadow of the tower and the clouds passing overhead reflected in the glass of the security partition for the queue to enter the Eiffel Tower. I took a chance that it would work, and voila! (Tish, that’s French!!!) I was afraid that it would come out fuzzy because I was trying to focus on two different things that were not actually on the plane where they appeared (the security glass partition) and the color balance would be impossible to get right because the anti-shatter coatings on the glass created a bit of a prismatic effect. There’s still a touch of yellow in the clouds I couldn’t eliminate but otherwise it wasn’t too bad.
Here’s a shot of Notre Dame Cathedral, taken from a different perspective.
Towers, Notre Dame Cathedral
Notre Dame is actually a challenge to photograph because it has a very direct east-west orientation, so for much of the day, the facade that you want to see represented is facing west and in shadow/backlit. I was able to time this photo in the late afternoon so it was well illuminated.
The Rollei made for a perfect travel camera – phenomenal image quality, very easy to handle, and because it is so quiet (no mirror slap, the leaf shutter just makes a little ‘snick’ when it fires) it is great for candids. Thinking of which, I did grab a couple portraits of friends of mine who came over from London to visit. They recently moved there from Singapore. The last time we saw each other in person was 2003, so almost exactly a decade apart. Gosh have we all changed, but it was so great to see them again.
Mirza and PeterMirza, Cafe Le ProgrèsPeter, Profile, Blvd St. Martin
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