Basilique Sacré-Coeur, Paris

I'll admit I fell in love with Sacre Coeur the day we visited it in Paris. While I could give the tourist trap parts of Montmartre a big miss, Sacre Coeur is magnificent. It stands tall over Paris and it's such a beautiful building.

We were so lucky to be there on a day when cute little puff ball clouds dotted the sky. It was a scene that called out for my fish eye lens. I love this lens. It has such a wide angle that it sees so much - more than the human eye can in terms of angle, and it does funky things to buildings at the very edge of the image. With it you have so much creative potential that it's worth lugging it around for 3 days and only using it a couple of times.

This image is here for Andrew Chow whom I met on a flight recently from Orlando to Los Angeles. We got talking - he was from Hong Kong originally so we had plenty to talk about and he was checking out some of my photos when I was organizing them. He really liked the ones of Montmartre.. so this is for you Andrew.. Enjoy!

Monmartre - in color

One thing I love doing to photos is to mess around with the color. This photo was ripe for it and I dragged heaps of color out of the image and then worked to blend and tone it back down until I had a look I really liked.

The building is just by Abbesses Metro station in Montmartre, Paris. The station itself has the original Art Nouveau signage and canopy and it has a huge spiral staircase which is covered in art going up and photography going down - ask me, I climbed it and photographed every step of the way up and down. This building is just across the road from the station and it's gorgeous. It's a photographer's delight and very, very French.

If you look really close you'll even see a face and hands painted onto the face of the building.