As for Hunt #32, there was, for this Scavenger Hunt, an “extra credit” for the people submitting all 10 pictures: presenting all the pictures on a single image – the exact formulation was “contact sheet”, but the constraints were “don’t overlap, don’t re-crop, don’t add borders; if the background is visible, black, white, or grey.

The first image I took was the one with the tin cans, and it has a fairly awkward size ratio, so I felt like I was in trouble. So, I planned.

I was super proud of myself: I had created an extra constraint for the pictures because for my rectangle to work, I needed precise ratios, but that was FINE, right? Right. Best plans of mice and men. For one thing, as you can see, there’s been a significant reshuffling of dimensions… and images! as I was getting the pictures 🙂

And then I put together the image, it was pretty bad. It became very apparent that I did need a neutral background to separate the pictures; the initial plan didn’t work at all. This was pretty disheartening, because the whole geometry worked well with these ratios, but adding borders to them wouldn’t work easily 😦 I considered re-cropping the images to make them work within the ratios, and gave up on the idea: it felt like re-editing the pictures to be able to add them to a “contact sheet”-type of image would kind of defeat the purpose. So, instead, I moved things around, I aligned images as I could, and I tried to get something as pleasantly looking as I could.

It means that the 3×2 images have far more grey space around them than I would have liked – but it ended up being the best I could do – otherwise I had more space in height, and that was worse. I was quite disappointed, to be honest – when I realized I had overlooked the space for the borders. But oh well, that’s how you learn. I still believe that trying to get the constraint first and shoot within these constraints was the right move – but I didn’t get the right constraints at the beginning 🙂

The complete Scavenger album is available here – along with its winners!: the Sheet album.