la belgique

lights out

So I am a violent sleeper. I toss and turn constantly and by the state of my deranged covers in the morning I also do snow angels in my sleep. I once woke up with my head where my feet were when I want to bed.

Point is, I move, alot. And this wasn't quite so apparent until I spent a night in Burgundy in a 16th century property renovated to retain many of it's original features such as the old oak beams and exposed stone walls. And motion sensored lighting over the bathroom mirror?

Did they have motion sensored lighting in the 16th century? I doubt it but that's not what bothered me. What bothered me was that my bed happened to be within motion sensoring range of said lights. So basically every time I moved they would switch on.

Now in a conscious state of mind I knew the trick to this was to keep completely still until I fell asleep and didn't notice. Unfortunately every time I nodded off, I would be back to my body shifting, limb moving ways and *click* the light would shine brightly in my direction effectively waking me up.

Will myself still, nodd off, *click*. Rinse and repeat.

Exhausted from my day of a long luxurious lunch accompanied by wine + a long luxurious dinner accompanied by more wine, the best I could come up with to do was to turn 180 degrees so that my head was shelded by the partial wall.

Is there a facebook I hate motion sensor lighting page? Because I'd like to become a fan.

sunday afternoon

bourgogne

point and shoot

So a friend of mine is doing photography tours of Paris and did a practice tour the other night. Since the tour is made for amateurs I was the perfect subject.

Or so I thought. The other people there may have been amateurs as well but I was by far the worse. For starters my camera had the least number of letters in the name (which by my observation is directly related to quality).

To his credit my friend did try to help me get a good shot but unfortunately to do so required that I know (what he considers) normal things about my camera like how to modify the settings.

After random button pushing I managed to get this shot:



Filled with confidence I started playing with things like light, reflection, and "the rule of thirds":



Our next assignment was to do something original with the classic shot of the Eiffel tower from the bridge (full dis-closer: I had the small tripod):



The last assignment was to play with the shutter speed and take a picture of moving traffic. Unfortunately trying to get my camera to change settings all night and being unsuccessful, my friend came to the conclusion that my camera doesn't have a "real" manual setting and I had to make do with the pre-set options.

And that I did. I call the following shot "Fireworks - 15 second shutter speed":