For 52Frames, this week, the idea was to give up some control and to give a picture to edit to “someone else”. There was a handy sign-up sheet with 52Framers offering their services and what they were willing to work with; my editor for this picture of a pretty rock was Mary Lesh.

I usually work better within a set of constraints; the 52Frames constraints are actually usually slightly too loose for my taste, and without a guiding theme, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. I considered going outside for a few shots (I noticed a few things I want to get in my camera recently), but my “social budget” for the day was tapped out, so I decided to stay home with my studio.

When it comes to studio, I do like photographing minerals. I also knew that this would give some leeway/freedom to my editor: they could either focus on the details, or take advantage of the space around the rock. And I had this very pretty rock (as far as I can tell, barite & vanadinite?) that hadn’t been in front of my camera yet. This is the image I sent to Mary (exported from RAW to JPG with no settings changed):

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length	50mm
F-Number	F/32.0
Exposure time	8 s
ISO	125

I thought it’d be fun to do a parallel edit to see what could be done starting with the same image 🙂 I must say that I was looking for the same kind of crop as Mary sent to me, but for the life of me couldn’t “find” it. So I flipped the image (and not the table) and went for a much closer crop, and ended up with this:

Mary told me she’d left a lot of white space if I wanted to add a quote or something. I must say that I like the idea a lot, and that it had not crossed my mind ever before. Aaaand I do like the white space as it is too.

This was, for me, a very interesting experiment, even starting with a shot as basic as the one I submitted. Thanks Mary for playing that game with me!