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":