Cee's Fun Photo Challenge: Monotone

This week, Cee's photo challenge is a celebration of monotone.  It can be particularly challenging to make something that's basically one color interesting and eye-catching and quite frankly, most of what I looked at in my photos that would have fit this challenge?  Yawn.  But here are some of the ones I liked most, with some short explanations and/or descriptions.I was informed last year that Christmas won't be Christmas without a supply of this stuff, so I am now locked into providing caramel corn for my family, for the rest of my natural life.  There are worse things I could have to do.  It is pretty darn tasty!I really like that the land and the sky are basically the exact same color in this picture, and I love that this piece of land has such a tremendous tidal fluctuation that the water, well receded in this shot, comes up to the rocks at high tide.We'll spend the rest of this blog in France...

The French seem to be enamored of buildings made out of the same building material, or at least the same color building material, for large stretches of area (more on that later).  So looking down an alley can be weirdly disconcerting, because the matchy-match on either side makes it seem almost like walking down an interior hallway from which a roof has been removed.  A very tall hallway, perhaps, but a hallway nonetheless.

On the grounds of Chateau de Chenonceau, an OMFG I must be dreaming sort of place, if ever I've seen one, there is a hedge maze.  It's not an immensely tall, creepy, lurking death sort of hedge maze a la The Shining but rather, a charming little whimsical hedge maze that you could chase your intended around while flirting over the tops of the bushes.  There's a groovy little cozy-ish, semi-organic-looking gazebo in the middle of the hedge maze, with all sorts of frilly plants at its border.  This is from that gazebo, looking over the hedge maze and capturing all sorts of greenness that abounds.

Remember how I said that the French like to use similarly-colored building materials?  Behold!  Paris, as seen from an observation deck of the Eiffel Tower.

I got yer zinnia, riiiiight heeeeere.  Chenonceau also had a working replica of a 16th-century farm on its grounds, and they grow a tremendous amount of fruit and all the flowers used to decorate the chateau's rooms.  This was on that farm.  It is one of the most perfect, most explodingly orange flowers I've ever seen.The average visitor isn't allowed to use a flash in the Catacombs, since constant exposure to light could damage the structure of the remains of roughly 6 million people laid to rest under the streets of Paris.  So you've got to use your low-light setting instead.  This is what you get.  The quote is from Book X of the Aeneid translates as: Every man has his day, the course of life is brief and cannot be recalled: but virtue's task is this, to increase fame by deeds.  More or less, of course, depending on how flowery the translator gets, and considering some of the translations I've read of this quote alone....hoo wee!  They can get flowery.I really like this, partly because it reminds me that life is short and it is what we make of it.  And perhaps more importantly, it also highlights that we're all the same color on the inside.  Can you tell if these bones belonged to someone black, white, Asian?  Yeah.  Me neither.Some of these photos may be in the spirit of the photo challenge more than to the letter of it, but it was a lot of fun finding stuff.  Here's the link to Cee's challenge again, if you don't want to scroll to the top of the page.  Check out the other photos!  Or you could, of course, decide to play along.Thanks for stopping by!