… or more properly, le Grand Palais, just off the Champs-Élysées in Paris, France. I was there  roughly 6 months ago, in uncomfortably hot conditions during the day, and surprisingly chilly extremes during the evening. As I wandered along, completely unprepared (other than happening to have a camera strapped to my back), I stumbled upon this outrageously majestic, fabulously backlit piece of Gallic masonry, with a cold frost in the air to illuminate the vapours of darkness.

It. Needed. Photographing!

I wanted to go in tight for this shot, to capture the truly imposing nature of the architecture, but that would have needed an inhumanly steady hand. With no handy tripod, there was only one option; whack up the ISO, zoom to max, shoot at f4, & hope for the best from my shutter speed! By so doing, I’d accepted that there’d be inescapable noise, especially since this was my inferior EOS 5D mk 2, which doesn’t handle the dark so well. The result is an image which excites the romantic within me for its lighting 🙂, yet disappoints the perfectionist within me for its grain 😦  The ideal here would be f20 –> ISO 100 –> tripod –> deploy. But ‘sacrifices must be made’. N.b. the two specks of white in the sky are in fact prominent stars, not sensor catastrophes, and I’m actually quite fond of them, after much deliberation!

Shot on a Canon EOS 5D mk 2, 24-105mm lens at 105mm, f 4.0, ISO 3200, 1/13 sec.