Shooting the Eiffel Tower in a way that isn't cliche is extremely difficult, to be blunt. In the thirty minutes or so that I had to shoot before the group left, I tried to see the park and tower in a different way. I had been there before, in both day and night, but my creativity hadn't really gone to its greatest lengths.
Today I tried to use a tilt-shift technique that a photographer friend told me about. Basically taking the lens off the camera body and holding it about a centimeter off the mount. If you angle the lens up or down it can give you the same effect as a tilt-shift lens. This trick takes a lot of practice and is kind of sketchy without a tripod, seeing as you have to hold and focus the lens with one hand and shoot with the other. The top photo uses this effect, probably at a focal length of 28 millimeters, the focus point is supposed to be the base of the tree.
Along with tilt-shift I tried to experiment with capturing motion. The carousel across the street form the tower made for a great shot that didn't feature the Eiffel Tower but showed in the context that it is placed in. Being a fairly bright day, getting a slow enough shutter speed proved somewhat of a challenge, and accounts for the star flaring of the sun. I probably set the shutter speed at 1/10, the aperture at f/22 (highest), and the ISO at 50 (lowest), and then turned the exposure down in photoshop to get this image the way I wanted it.
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