Scavenger Hunt round 45

Published on by Balise

I’ve been a very avid participant to the Photography Scavenger Hunt in the past, but I had let a few rounds go by recently for reasons that are not entirely clear to me either. For this round, I decided to get back on the horse and to submit pictures; we went to Iceland this summer, and I mostly submitted shots from that trip, including some “found shots” shoehorned into the theme after the fact! We did have to submit a grid of pictures as a bonus as well, though, so I reframed/cropped all the pictures so that they could fit on said grid.

In the order of the reveals, here are the pictures I submitted. The headings have links to the albums of my fellow Scavengers.

Asphalt

Asphalt was not a found shot, I knew the word was on the list, and I hunted it down specifically. When we were near a geothermal plant on the sixth day of our trip, this road going upwards seemingly alone in that terrain caught my eye, and I took multiple shots of it. I liked this one best, with the large white vehicle in the foreground – we’ve seen a lot of these during our trip.

A two-way asphalt road going up between brown/green hills. A few vehicles are driving on it, including a large white mountain car with a small trailer. The foreground is light-colored dirt.

Bleak

Another one that was less “found shot” and more “I have bleak on my list, and this is actually pretty bleak.” That’s one of the recent lava fields near Grindavík, which we saw on the last day of our trip. Volcanoes are fascinating and terrifying, and Iceland is a constant reminder of that.

Black lava rock covering the vast majority of the image, with rugged texture. On top of the image there's a bit of grey menacing sky with clouds.

Ink

Well, that one is the only one that I did not shoot in Iceland; I came home, and I had nothing that I could make fit from that trip. So I got my tripod and light box out, a large water recipient, and some blue ink, and I made some ink patterns. It’s honestly quick and dirty for studio work, which makes it somewhat unsatisfying, but better a mid pic than no pic! 😀

Swirls of blue ink over a white background. The ink patterns looks a bit like jellyfish.

Goth

I was probably thinking more of “bleak” than of “goth” when I took this picture on our day 10 on the black sand beach, but I think it worked well for Goth as well. I would like to point out that this picture is NOT processed as black and white and that it is indeed color photography!

A very gloomy landscape with black sand in the foreground, grey sea (with very light hints of green), and in the background rocks protruding from the sea, barely visible despite their large size because of thick fog.

Ant

This one was part found shot and part not. I didn’t have the word in my mind at all when I took the picture (I was more interested in the geyser!) but I knew exactly what to use when I saw the word again – small faraway people looking like ants! And a lot of them too. This was on the last day of our trip.

A geyser eruption, probably a couple of dozens of meters high, next to a crowd of people who look tiny next to the water jet. The scene is photographed from far away; around the geyser there is red soil with low green vegetation and a few buildings.

Mystery

Mystery was absolutely a found shot. I had put that in “this is probably a Scavenger picture” when I sorted through my travel photos because the way the lava shows through the shadows makes it very difficult for me to see anything else than a fox with fiery eyes… but it’s “just” the way lava fell there. Also this was during the Lava show part of our visit on the 10th day.

A black and red dark picture showing glowing lava in a dark room. In the bottom right corner, the lava has two bright spots that look like eyes which sell the illusion of a fire fox hiding in the pattern.

Jet

Jet was pretty much a given: I’m travelling by plane, surely I’ll be able to snap a jet picture of some kind. Hence, I have a bit more plane picz than usual – and I really liked this one 🙂

The wing of an Icelandair airplane, seen above a landscape composed of a large dark green forest on the bottom left part of the picture and a multitude of colorful fields in the rest of the picture. A light blue lake is visible in the distance.

Elegant

Horses in Iceland are very photogenic, and I went through my horse pictures to find one for the theme. It was harder than I expected because the best horses didn’t necessarily work background-wise, but I eventually decided on this one.

A small brown horse with lighter hair, looking very well kept, with green fields and a few buildings in the background.

Shadow

Shadow was the hardest word of this Hunt for me, and I’m not very convinced with what I ended up submitting – this is the entrance of a small cave that we popped by almost by chance (tiny place, just a couple of interesting holes 🙂 ). But it definitely has a large shadow considering the lack of light!

A small dark cave below a rocky surface with a bit of grass. The entrance looks human-sized, the cave is almost completely dark, a small dirt track is leading to it.

Grid

The final word was Grid, as a bonus to show all your pictures in a single one. I would have much preferred having all Iceland pictures, but Ink and Jet are a bit the odds one out (for Jet I probably had alternatives if it had been the only odd one out). I had laid out my grid before I did the processing of the other pictures, because it constrained the ratios of my crops; I considered going for all squares, but I felt like the longer format worked better.

A 3x3 rectangular collage of all the previous pictures; from left to right and top to bottom Asphalt, Ants, Jet, Ink, Elegant, Shadow, Goth, Bleak and Mystery.

And there, another round done! We’ll see how the next one goes 🙂

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