Aamir Zakaria Photography

On day 15 of my Paris Pho­tog­ra­phy adven­ture, I decid­ed to vis­it the Cen­tre Georges Pom­pi­dou, which hous­es a large library, the largest mod­ern art col­lec­tion in Europe, and an acoustic research cen­ter. Appar­ent­ly, it was open.

It’s a very bizarre-look­ing build­ing, most notable for the tubu­lar walk­ways and esca­la­tors on the outside.

My vis­it­ing friend Dana thought the inside looked like some­thing out of the movie “Logan’s Run.”

The muse­um itself is huge, and there’s no way to see it all in one day. As with any good muse­um, it is a visu­al smor­gas­bord on which your eyes and cam­era can feast. I only made it through part of the top lev­el. Here are a few images I thought were espe­cial­ly camera-worthy.

Here’s the largest piece of extrud­ed alu­minum in the world. I’ve always want­ed to take a pic­ture of extrud­ed aluminum.

There is an exten­sive art book­store on the ground lev­el, includ­ing a large num­ber of pho­tog­ra­phy mono­graphs. Perus­ing these shelves was just as enjoy­able as the muse­um itself. 

Anoth­er rea­son to go is the view from the top floor. A cou­ple of friends also rec­om­mend­ed the Les Georges restau­rant there for the view and food, but the food was over­priced and the view was no bet­ter than in the hall­way.  How­ev­er,  you do get to stare at some nice roses.

In the evening, Dana and I decid­ed to take the ele­va­tor all the way to the top of the Eif­fel Tower.

By the way, here’s pic­ture of Dana and I from the bus tour the night before.  I’m the one in the back.

There are three floors to the Eif­fel Tow­er. The first floor is reached by tak­ing the stairs, and since I was car­ry­ing about a thou­sand pounds of cam­era gear, we opt­ed for the ele­va­tor. The lines were sur­pris­ing­ly short when we got there just after 7 pm. The ele­va­tor takes you up to the sec­ond floor, where the best angle is point­ing straight up.

Those small pyri­mad-shaped struc­tures are the lights that sparkle at night.

We then wait­ed in anoth­er line that took us to the top. This sec­ond line took about 45 min­utes, but it did­n’t seem bad because you can take in the view while waiting.

Once at the top, you have a panoram­ic view of the city. It was a per­spec­tive I had­n’t got­ten from my oth­er aer­i­al views. The down­town and large parks were much more promi­nent from this view, and I was bet­ter able to appre­ci­ate the uni­form Parisian archi­tec­ture and the unique road design. What a dif­fer­ence from the grids that char­ac­ter­ize most large cities. That’s Tro­cadero Plaza in the foreground.

I thought this shiny tele­scope made a nice pho­to­graph­ic sub­ject. In this shot, I lined up the tele­scope as if some­one was look­ing down at the city, giv­ing the eye a nice line to fol­low. I opened my aper­ture to f/4 to give me a shal­low depth of field focused just on the tele­scope, leav­ing the city beyond in a blur.

We end­ed up stay­ing until just after sun­set to see some of the lights come up in the city. While wait­ing in line on the sec­ond floor, the white sparkling lights came on in the Tow­er. This view was spec­tac­u­lar from where we stood.

It was a great way to end the evening, and it gave me yet one more per­spec­tive on the Eif­fel Tower.

Tomor­row I’m going to take some street pho­tos and catch up on a few remain­ing night shots.