Fête des Lumières

I went out to the Fête des Lumières today, which was pretty great. The whole city has fancy lights, and then there are light shows on the sides of buildings in most public squares. I imagine this was pretty pedestrian back in the day, but with high-quality digital projectors, you can really put on a show. Since I don't have a camera, some pictures I found on the internet. My friend Javier took some pictures, some of which follow (his bluelephant photo stream at flickr is here with the rest):


I really liked how they took buildings, like churches, and added fake features to them (like heavy relief sculptures of saints, or a rapidly moving clock). Some buildings were "digitally altered" like this, and others were basically huge screens for projected psychedelic movies, which still integrated with the buildings.


And the streets were packed. I'm not sure why it's not like this every night. Here are the most impressive of the rest of the pictures -- these same ones, plus some less impressive ones, are posted to facebook as well, and also available at Javier's flickr page.