Reviled when it was built as a fun house rocket ship and aesthetic monstrosity, it’s amazing how the Tour Eiffel in fact manifests visual grace with decorative flourishes and curls in the ironwork. Seen from a distance with the lights of Paris turned on, the spectacle is a bit amusement park—but up close there’s an almost decorative art nouveau feeling, despite an anachronistic and blatant attempt at modernism.

To make this image, I turned my camera up towards the tour. To exaggerate the open and lacy feeling of the structure, I overexposed by about 2 EVs. This made sure that the darker areas of the tower didn’t go entirely black, and allowed the filigree patterns in the less dense areas to emerge.

The final settings at 22mm focal length and ISO 200 were a 1/80 of a second shutter speed and f/4.5.