Category: Photography

Scavenger Hunt round 45

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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 🙂

Iceland photo processing and sharing

Published on by Balise3 Comments

There! I am done processing my pictures from Iceland.

For the quick version: I have a full set of ~250 pictures here: Iceland 2025, and a smaller “highlights” set of 36 pictures here: Iceland 2025 Highlights.

I have also sorted pictures by day (there’s nothing more in the “day” albums than in the large album), to go with the individual blog posts. I’ve added a link at the bottom of each post to the album; if you want “travel commentary” to go with the pictures, that’s probably the way to go! For reference:

I spent more time than usual thinking about the way to cull and process all these pictures; I had roughly 1500 DSLR pictures, to which I wanted to add a few of the pictures taken with phones (mostly selfies!) This definitely required a vaguely more thoughtful approach than “just get everything into a folder and sort and process my favorites”, as it would have felt like a very heavy process – divide and conquer for the win!

I first imported all the pictures on my hard drive and into Lightroom; that’s pretty much a given, and that took a non-trivial amount of time (I suspect my card reader may not be the fastest.) Then, I put everything into collections. I tend to use keywords rather than collections; I do remember that I had a rationale for putting things into collections rather than keywords, but I don’t remember what it was 😅 My collections were place-based, AND numbered. I heavily used the GPS coordinates stored by my camera to make sure that I was putting the right pictures in the right collection, and with that I arrived at 39 sets of pictures. Of these, I had four sets that were more than 80 pictures (with a max at 108), and the rest was below 60 pictures, which felt generally more manageable.

I started by getting a single “best-of” picture for each of these sets (a few of these didn’t make the cut already), and I processed these first. Worst case, I had a good set of 36 pictures – yay.

Then, I went through all sets individually, culling pictures that were identical to another one, or not necessarily representative, or just plainly bland. I typically did 2-3 passes on larger sets to get a tighter selection. Once that was done, processing/editing − that’s a fairly standard process, and I got better/faster at it with AlphabeticalZürich. I’m not necessarily *good* at it objectively (I possibly edit too dark and/or too saturated), but it yields images that I like, which is the most important thing.

Finally, I uploaded pictures to “day” albums as I went through them. After processing a full day, I went back to the phone pictures, I added selfies and other phone pictures that required an addition to the album, and I continued to the next set. I also added all the pictures of the “day album” to the global album.

And that’s pretty much it!

Let me add a picture to this blog post so that I have a thumbnail when I share it:

Brown and red mountains, with a clearly visible ridge/path in the middle; in the foreground, dark lava stones and some moss.
Landmannalaugar

Scavenger Hunt #39 – Bonus – Break the rules!

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The 39th Scavenger Hunt had an overarching theme, Rose, and 10 other words to associate to it. I went for a very literal interpretation of that, got myself a rose bouquet (on discount because they were starting to fade quite a bit) and managed the whole Hunt in one (long) afternoon.

This was my entry for the bonus word, “Break the Rules!”. And, well – the first rule of photography is that you don’t destroy your subject 😉 So, that’s what I did first. I also went for a very “on-the-nose” centered composition (which is supposed to be “boring”). I also had a lot of out-of-focus takes, but they were working significantly less well than this one.

A disk of pink rose petals and green rose leaves centered on a black square background.

And the original – not much to be said here except for the exposure/color and crop.

A disk of pink rose petals and green rose leaves centered on a black background. The picture is underexposed.
CameraPentax K-1 II
Lenssmc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length50mm
F-NumberF/5
Exposure time1/50s
ISO800

Other pictures from my fellow Scavengers: Break the Rules

Scavenger Hunt #39 – Silhouette

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The 39th Scavenger Hunt had an overarching theme, Rose, and 10 other words to associate to it. I went for a very literal interpretation of that, got myself a rose bouquet (on discount because they were starting to fade quite a bit) and managed the whole Hunt in one (long) afternoon.

This was my entry for the word “Silhouette”, and it is both my favorite picture… and the one I spent the most time on 😉 (Coincidence? Probably not.) I wanted the rose bouquet to be recognizable as such; I wanted it to be reasonably “tidy”, I wanted the wooden support to have the “right” angles on each side, and I was working with a fairly narrow margin on my white wall. This is not PERFECT, but this is the closest I could get. Probably should have gotten a tripod out there 😉 (yeah, it’s a theme of this hunt.)

A silhouette of a rose bouquet on a wooden stool, with a pink background.

Here’s the original version, which DOES show the narrow margin on the background 😀 I’m quite happy I decided to process it in a pink hue, I think it worked really well.

A silhouette of a rose bouquet on a wooden stool, also showing a bit of the "outside" context (the end of a back wall, a frame on the wall).
CameraPentax K-1 II
Lenssmc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length100mm
F-NumberF/8
Exposure time1/100 s
ISO800

Other pictures from my fellow Scavengers: Silhouette

Scavenger Hunt #39 – Framing

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The 39th Scavenger Hunt had an overarching theme, Rose, and 10 other words to associate to it. I went for a very literal interpretation of that, got myself a rose bouquet (on discount because they were starting to fade quite a bit) and managed the whole Hunt in one (long) afternoon.

This was my entry for the word “Framing”, which is probably the image where I displayed most my smartass character – typically one would use framing to frame the subject, and here I used my subject as frame parts.

I long pondered *what* I could frame with my roses – until I thought of the hexagon pictures I have in my office. I detached them from their magnets, re-set them up on a horizontal surface, and arranged my roses around them.

I’m not very happy with this image, because it feels like it had potential to be much cleaner; as it is, it feels more like a first concept than a final image. But, it was the last image I shot, and I was tired, so it stayed that way. I also tried to edit away the shadows, but it was honestly much worse than leaving them, sooo.

Five hexagonal tiles showing landscapes, arranged 2-1-2, framed by four roses around it

The original, showing the source of most issues: the light was *terrible* (because I hadn’t made the effort to make it right!).

CameraPentax K-1 II
Lenssmc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length50mm
F-NumberF/6.3
Exposure time1/60 s
ISO800

Other pictures from my fellow Scavengers: Framing

Scavenger Hunt #39 – Patterns/Repetition

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The 39th Scavenger Hunt had an overarching theme, Rose, and 10 other words to associate to it. I went for a very literal interpretation of that, got myself a rose bouquet (on discount because they were starting to fade quite a bit) and managed the whole Hunt in one (long) afternoon.

This was my entry for the word Patterns/Repetition. I think this was the first one that I shot, because I wanted my rose bouquet to still be tied so that I could get some kind of easy repetition!

A close up of a pink rose bouquet, where 5 roses are visible (and 5 more are out of frame, but their edges are still there).

The original was quite close from the final picture, up to exposure and cropping.

A close up of a pink rose bouquet, where 5 roses are visible (and 5 more are out of frame, but their edges are still there). The image is darker and one can see the paper around the bouquet.
CameraPentax K-1 II
Lenssmc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length50mm
F-NumberF/8
Exposure time1/80s
ISO1600

Other pictures from my fellow Scavengers: Patterns/Repetition

Scavenger Hunt #39 – Golden Ratio

Published on by BaliseLeave a comment

The 39th Scavenger Hunt had an overarching theme, Rose, and 10 other words to associate to it. I went for a very literal interpretation of that, got myself a rose bouquet (on discount because they were starting to fade quite a bit) and managed the whole Hunt in one (long) afternoon.

This was my entry for the word “Golden Ratio”. I went for the “spiral” interpretation of the word, and it was mostly a matter of cropping the image in the “right” way so that the golden spiral would appear, somewhere, somehow. I also learnt things about my tools grids – there ARE guides for golden ratio and golden spiral! that was very useful.

This picture is also the reason why I went for a B&W processing on “Fill the Frame“, so that two fairly similar pictures would still have a different feel!

A close-up picture of a rose, off-centered and with the petals forming a spiral aiming at representing the golden ratio.

The original was less golden-spiraley, but I knew I could make it work on the crop.

An under-exposed close-up picture of a rose
CameraPentax K-1 II
Lenssmc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length100mm
F-NumberF/7.1
Exposure time1/160 s
ISO800

Other pictures from my fellow Scavengers: Golden Ratio

Scavenger Hunt #39 – Leading lines

Published on by BaliseLeave a comment

The 39th Scavenger Hunt had an overarching theme, Rose, and 10 other words to associate to it. I went for a very literal interpretation of that, got myself a rose bouquet (on discount because they were starting to fade quite a bit) and managed the whole Hunt in one (long) afternoon.

This was my entry for the word Leading Lines.

Flowers have some natural leading lines, which I shamelessly exploited for this shot; I had shot multiple settings but I liked the diagonal arrangement best.

Five roses on a white background, all of them with roughly the same stem length, with the base of their stems positioned on a diagonal line.

My initial idea was to have them somewhat less straight than vertical, but that didn’t work as well in my view. My lack of tripod (and proper lighting) was disturbing.

Five roses disposed diagonally on a white table
CameraPentax K-1 II
LensPentax D FA 24-70mm F2.8
smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Pentax DA 18-55mm 1:3.5-5.6 AL
Focal length63mm
F-NumberF/1.8
Exposure time1/100 s
ISO111

Other pictures from my fellow Scavengers: Leading lines

Scavenger Hunt #39 – High key/low key

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The 39th Scavenger Hunt had an overarching theme, Rose, and 10 other words to associate to it. I went for a very literal interpretation of that, got myself a rose bouquet (on discount because they were starting to fade quite a bit) and managed the whole Hunt in one (long) afternoon.

This was my entry for the word “High key/low key”.

Two images of a rose, side by side, one very dark on a black background, the other one very bright on a white background. Bothe roses look somewhat symmetrical to each other, pointing to the middle-bottom of the whole picture.

I was wondering if there was a way to use the same image for both and let the processing play on the high/low key, but it didn’t feel like something I wanted to explore with that little time. So I took two pictures – and yeah, both are vastly underexposed because I was working without a tripod.

My images were initially not looking symmetrical to one another, so I flipped the lowkey one, because it looked better side by side 🙂

An almost completely black picture, where one might discern some very dark rose petals and leaves.
CameraPentax K-1 II
Lenssmc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length100mm
F-NumberF/8
Exposure time1/100 s
ISO800

An underexposed picture of a rose on a white table
CameraPentax K-1 II
Lenssmc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length100mm
F-NumberF/8
Exposure time1/100 s
ISO800

Other pictures from my fellow Scavengers: Low key/high key

Scavenger Hunt #39 – Blue Hour

Published on by BaliseLeave a comment

The 39th Scavenger Hunt had an overarching theme, Rose, and 10 other words to associate to it. I went for a very literal interpretation of that, got myself a rose bouquet (on discount because they were starting to fade quite a bit) and managed the whole Hunt in one (long) afternoon.

This was my entry for the word “Blue Hour”. For this one, it felt quite necessary to go outside, so that’s a shot of my roses on the balcony. It did require some acrobatics to be able to shoot it in a reasonably stable way, while keeping the fence of the balcony out of the frame! I particularly like the sky on this one 🙂

A pink bouquet of roses in front of a cloudy sky

And that’s the original picture. As you can see, there has been some creative crop and, as for all the pictures in this Hunt or so it seems, a vast underexposure of the original material.

A pink bouquet of roses in front of a cloudy sky, underexposed and with a few distracting walls around it
CameraPentax K-1 II
Lenssmc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length50mm
F-NumberF/8
Exposure time1/60 s
ISO800

Other pictures from my fellow Scavengers: Blue Hour