Chartres Light Show on the Cathedral and Beyond

This fall, we went down to Chartres (only an hour or so from Paris, without traffic at least) to see the light show that runs most nights from spring to fall.  The show consists of moving images exactly fit to the outlines of the cathedral and other structures around town.  They custom-engineered projectors and imagery to fit each exact site of the projections.  It's impressive to see.

The photos below are photos of the buildings at night, during the show.

They do still projections, but the projections are also animated.  Sometimes they have little people climbing up the walls, or a whole field of stars gliding across the face of the cathedral,  This looks more like a drawing, but it's a photo.

They have a series of images and animations they show on various sides of the buildings.  This is on one side of the Cathedral.

This is another church in Chartres.

Beach Fireworks in San Sebastian Spain

At the end of our summer vacation, we ended up in San Sebastian, a fun beach town on the northern coast of Spain, about an hour from the border with France.  They've got two really big, excellent, sandy beaches.  The bigger beach reminded me of Nice, with a promenade full of people walking and biking all along the seawall overlooking the beach.

By sheer dumb luck, we ended up there for the biggest event of the year; a fireworks contest with a show every night for a week.  Each day, we went down to the beach, then back to the hotel for a quick shower, took the bus to the pedestrian area full of walk-up tapas bars for dinner, and finally, back to the beach for the fireworks.  Here's how the beach looked every night just before the fireworks.

We set up down on the beach to take photos. You can see the vague outlines of people standing on the beach at lower right in this one.

Most of the fireworks were not so high in the sky, but some then shot way above where I had framed the photo.  You can see some coming down from above in this one.  Why is that one lady looking sideways and taking a photo?  They had fireworks sent up from a barge in the bay also. 

Some of these were taken hand-held with our small camera.  In order to hand-hold, I had to up the ISO, which means a lot more noise in the photos. 

Other photos were taken with the big camera on a tripod, and have noticeably less colorful speckles of noise.  The next two are examples of that.  On a small screen, it may not be noticeable, but I like to look at them on as big a screen as possible.

At bottom of the above photo, I noticed people doing something I'd never thought of.   Here's an enlargement where you can see them, swimming in the ocean at night while watching fireworks.  Those crazy kids!

San Sebastian is also only an hour away from Bilbao.  One rainy day, we took the opportunity to go visit Frank Gehry's architectural blockbuster museum in Bilbao.  Jennifer got this one when we walked up onto the nearby bridge to get a better view.

Here's my psychedelic geometric abstraction of the museum building.

All of the was at the end of a trip with lots of other great photos, but more nature-related.  Here's a link to the photos from the Ordesa Hike in the Spanish Pyrenees.