For Keys, I wanted to avoid taking pictures of my home keys, because that was boring and possibly somewhat dangerous to put on the Internet 😛 I also happen to have an Allen key on my keychain, so that was an option; then I thought about piano (I don’t have a piano), keyboard (I do have a lot of keyboards, but no fun idea with them), sheet music keys…. guitar keys!

Once the idea was there, the realization was fairly straightforward – guitar, Lume cube, dark background, SHIP IT!

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length	50mm
F-Number	F/10
Exposure time	1 s
ISO	250

I did a first pass on Darktable to develop the raw to my liking:

Then there’s been some long and painful edit to get rid of the textured background, which I kind of liked per se, but which was distracting in the context of the picture. Keeping the small star of reflection a the bottom of the bottom key was also a large pain.

I’m not super happy with the fact that the bottom key is out of the depth of field (focus stacking may have helped, because I was already at F/10…), but apart from that, I don’t hate the image.

For more interpretations of the theme, see the Keys Scavenger album!