Giant Ginkgo

This is one of my favorite pictures that I took in France, but it requires seeing it at a fairly decent size to see the constellation in it. This was an extremely long exposure, I think it was in the 30 second range. I'm still surprised by how well it came out, considering that I was holding the camera with a monopod, and there was a quite strong breeze in the corner that I was standing in.

These were taken around Christmas last year, when my girlfriend and I visited Nice. The old town was almost too picture perfect, with interesting old buildings with fascinating textures and windows crowded together in a way unimaginable in a modern US city. Walking the streets was an exciting affair, they were extremely narrow so there was hardly any room when a car, moped or fire truck passed.

The photo above is a miniature firetruck racing through the streets, avoiding the pedestrians and doing their best to navigate their way through the confusing streets. They had actually stopped for a half a minute to figure out what path they should turn down next, there are many dead ends and surprise twists in this part of town. The firefighters looked too big for the vehicle, they were forced to sit forwards so that they didn't constantly hit the roof.

We ended up wandering aimlessly around the streets late at night, occasionally joined by the locals going about their business. It felt amazingly safe in this part of Nice, even after 12am in the morning, when this photo was taken. France is a country with an amazing number of pet dogs, and we saw many people like this man who were out walking them. This is one area of French culture that could use some refinement though - dodging dog poop was a continuous process whenever we were out walking the streets.

This picture reminds me a lot of a couple of scenes from the lovely movie Angel's Egg, which is set in a deserted European style world. I couldn't help but wonder about what European cities the director and the designer had wandered around in to come up with that film's look and feel.

Christmas was very subdued in France, which was a truly wonderful thing. No endless carols, over-decorated shops, or insane consumerism. Just the occasional Christmas Markets (Strasbourg had an especially impressive one around the cathedral) and Santa Claus dolls climbing into people's homes.