Télé-Paris Picture Time!

I realize I haven't posted any pictures since we returned to France, and since a picture is worth a thousand words (or perhaps worth even more than a thousand of my words), here are a few new ones.  As always, more are on my Flickr site.

I carried my large telephoto lens all the way to Paris, but didn't take it out of its case until just this week.  Don't ask me why.  But, as a result, all the pictures here are taken with the bigger lens.  The advantage of the telephoto lens is that it gives you great zoom shots; the disadvantage is that you miss some shots because of the inability to get far enough away from the subject.  Also, as you photographers know, a big lens reduces the amount of available light, and between that and the fact that the effect of unsteady hands is amplified with a big lens, often pictures can be not as sharp.  But most of these came out fine.  So, here we go, some pictures from the last week in Paris. The first few were taken on a walk I took alone on a cloudy, cold, windy day. First, a dark, moody shot of the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde:



For those who don't know, the obelisk is the real deal. The obelisk is

a pink granite monolith that was given to the French in 1829 by the viceroy of Egypt, Mehemet Ali. The edifice, which once marked the entrance to the Amon temple at Luxor, is more than 3,300 years old and is decorated with hieroglyphics portraying the reigns of the pharaohs Ramses II and Ramses III. Gilded images on the pedestal portray the monumental task of transporting the monolith to Paris and erecting it at the square. Installed in 1833, the Obelisk — weighing 230 tons and standing 22.83 meters (75 ft) high in the center of the Place — is flanked on both sides by two fountains constructed during the same period.

Here's a picture of one of the fountains, withe Eiffel Tower in the background.



From the Place de la Concorde, I walked up to the Arc de Triomphe, and took this picture of La Defense, the large business complex to the west of Paris:



And a final picture from this day, festive flags on the Champs Elysees:



Another day Suzie and her friend Sarah, visiting from New York, took a walk around Paris. Some shots from that jaunt include the Cemetery Montparnasse,



some Velibs:



and this shot, one of my personal favorites, taken just off of Boulevard St. Germain:



Yet another day we went to meet Suzie's conversation partner at a brasserie, and I had some time to kill beforehand, so I took this picture of Paris' Statue of Liberty, which is, I understand, an exact replica of the one in New York, which was erected by Americans living in Paris as a "thank you" to the French for the gift of New York liberty.



This picture shows where the statue is located:



Finally, today was a gorgeous day in Paris, sunny and clear, despite the forecast (which is wrong more than it is right, it seems), and our day took us to the big department store near the Opera, where these shots were taken.





Last but not least, something you rarely see, a nice picture of both me and Suzie (there are lots of nice pictures of her, but I have to be one of the least photogenic people in the world, so I avoid being in front of cameras most of the time):