I’ve been participating for a few hunts to what has been known as Chrysta Rae’s Scavenger Hunt, as Google+ Scavenger Hunt, and which these days is the Photography Scavenger Hunt – and I may or may not be in the US right now for next week’s Scavenger meetup 😉

This was the 25th Hunt, and as a way to celebrate, we got a very large hunt: 26 words! They were the words of the first Hunt, to which I didn’t participate. And, as you’d expect from the number, there was one word per letter of the alphabet.

I did manage to submit a picture for each word – and I’m very proud of that – although the overall quality of the pictures is obviously very inconsistent 🙂 (I’m still VERY HAPPY with a significant amount of my shots, so there’s that 🙂 )

In this post and the following two, I’ll present what I submitted; I’ll present them in the same order as they were revealed in our community, because this way I don’t have to think as much 😉 And I’m adding a link to the community albums as well – these are definitely fun to browse!

Acorn

I thought I’d be stumped by Acorn until almost the last minute. And then I remembered that the Swiss card game Jass had an Acorn suite! So I went to my neighboring toy shop, bought a maxi set of Jass cards (which means I can now play Jass – I just need to learn how to play 😉 ) and, after a bit of tinkering, I arrived at the shot above. I’m not super happy with it because I think it’s quite boring, but I’m happy I found something to submit 🙂

Z

I recently started playing with lettering and brush pen calligraphy, so that made my submission for Z kind of obvious. The drill sheet comes from The Postman’s Knock, and the picture itself is pretty straightforward 🙂

Xylophone

I think my Xylophone entry is my favorite for this Hunt. SOME PEOPLE argue that a XYLOphone is necessarily wood – and they’re not wrong, BUT considering the Hunt album, it’s VERY CLEAR that Fisher Price has done A LOT for the popular image that comes to mind when saying “xylophone” 😉

So I made mine with glasses filled with water – something which, as far as I can tell, happens at roughly one wedding out of two at least 😉 – and I used food coloring to evoke said Fisher Price image. I then played with the angle of the light – the one I ended up shooting had the light pretty low, which allowed to get colored shadows, which I really, really liked, at the cost of fairly strong reflections, which I liked… less.

Post-processing was mostly color correction to get a better visual (especially on the red and the orange) – I’m almost tempted to correct it now since I’ve seen that I had forgotten to correct the little dots at the bottom of the glasses for consistency 🙂

And, for the record: this xylophone is _roughly_ in tune – I could play a few tunes on it without hurting my ears too much (I do not have a very good ear, though 😉 ).

Sponge

For my Sponge entry, I went on a day trip to Konstanz – which I documented already: Sea Life. I had gone there for the specific purpose of shooting a sponge picture, and I’m happy the trip worked out 🙂

Whistle

For Whistle, I knew I wasn’t going to be stuck, because I knew that, in the worst case, I’d setup and shoot Whistle Stop (the board game). But then I was actually too lazy to setup the game, so I fell back on this – which involved a significant amount of YouTube watching to be able to pull off a credible whistle gesture. And no, I still can’t whistle that way. I’m very disappointed.

Hamburger

My Hamburger submission was a cell phone picture snagged at Fork&Bottle during a dinner with friends. It was a “backup” shot that I ended up using almost as is.

Underwear

Underwear (careful, NSFW album) was the word I had estimated with the highest chance of stumping me when the list came out. That’s not the kind of theme I’m super comfortable with 😀 But in the end, I’m very happy with what I came up with. I was definitely going for a “Nike ad” kind of aesthetics, and I think I pulled it off. (Well, except for the Adidas bag below, I guess.) It was also an opportunity to experiment with real studio lights and reflectors than a colleague of mine had lent me (which allowed me to conclude that I really didn’t want the same softbox setup because it was a huge pain to assemble 😉 ).

Newspaper

Another uninspired shot for Newspaper 😉 I almost snagged a picture from someone reading a newspaper on the train, but I didn’t manage to actually gather the courage to do that. So instead, I setup my tripod and my camera timer to take pictures every few seconds while I prepared newspaper for recycling (in Switzerland we have to bind paper together to recycle it) – so at least I learnt how to program my camera timer for that sort of sequence 🙂

Tire

I don’t exactly remember when I got the idea of “ooooh I need LEGO” for the Tire theme, but it was early enough that I had made a few attempts at setting things up with my regular collection of toys and concluded that I needed a figure at another scale than what I had. That made it quite obvious that I needed a LEGO Technic figurine – so I hit Bricklink, ordered a couple, and they arrived a few days later (so I’m now the owner of a couple of LEGO Technic guys.)

I honestly wish I had taken the time to re-shoot this one – at least to get a black road instead of my white-ish balcony. (I tried to edit it in post-processing and failed miserably 😉 ). Part of my issue there was that I couldn’t think of a place where I could find believable black terrain and not feel super self-conscious with my setup So to me, this one falls into the category of “I liked my idea, I’m really not convinced about my implementation”.

That’s it for this first reveal post – more to come!