For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.

For “Float”, I was first playing with the idea of boat/ship themed board games. I could find a few ideas, but nothing necessarily very convincing. Instead, I got out a game that doesn’t see much light these days, namely “Hey, that’s my fish!”, where the ice sheets on which the penguins stand are definitely floating.

In “Hey, that’s my fish”, players control a few penguins that try to feed themselves. They start on an hexagonal grid made of tiles and can move to other tiles in a straight line to arrive on tiles that have 1, 2 or 3 fish. When a penguin leaves a tile, their controlling player picks the tile in their reserve, making the board emptier and emptier… and the penguins’ situation more and more precarious! It’s a fun game, except for two things: 1/ I *always* lose because I suck at it 2/ the setup time is way too long for the game time.

To make the picture, I setup the game and played a few rounds quickly until I got a situation making clear that the penguins are floating on some small pieces of ice. I had setup the game over a sheet of blue gift paper to symbolize some water, and I played around a lot with the different penguins to avoid seeing all the same figures everywhere and whatnot.

This was my original picture:

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length	50mm
F-Number	F/8
Exposure time	1/25 s
ISO	500

I wanted to give more texture to the “blue sea” – so that was my next step after the basic edits. I separated the blue background from the game pieces and played around with Photoshop creative filters until I got what I wanted. I’m somewhat unhappy with the blur because it’s not aligning with the DOF blur of the pieces; I considered fixing it after I noticed it, but I got lazy. Bah, room for improvement for the next ones!

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Float album.