Bellinzona 2011

Bellinzona is the main city in the Swiss Canton of Ticino.  I first stopped here in April 2011.  A couple of “lucky” shots:

Cats

I’ve always admired cats.  They don’t feel the need to make a loud noise, climb your leg or do other things that supposedly more intelligent dogs feel the need to do.  True, you cannot really train them much and they get themselves into fixes periodically, but they would fend for themselves better than dogs ever could.  The following suspects were snapped around the UK.

Paris 2008

Sometimes you go somewhere where there should be a thousand good things to shoot and end up taking a bunch of mediocre shots and then occasionally a brief moment of inspiration produces something that stands apart from all the others.

Somewhere I wanted to visit was the Opera Garnier, the “real” Paris opera house to see the inspiration for Gaston Leroux’s ‘Phantom of the Opera’.  I wondered if the sets for the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical (both stage and cinematic version) came anywhere close to the interior of the place itself.  There is a long gallery along the fron of the building which is magnificently decorated but unfortunately light levels precluded a shake-free shot, even at high ISO and I had no tripod.  This however was taken in the stairwell.