The theme for this week’s 52Frames was Abstract, and I really liked the texture of this rock, found during a walk along the beach front. Not much to say here – this is basically reframing and moving a few cursors in Google Photos of a picture I took with my phone, but there wasn’t much thought around it (I like the colors, though!).
As you may have noticed, I already broke my previous streak − I did take some pictures for the Negative Space theme, but I forgot to post one in time. Still, get a negative space, as a treat:
Another “let’s get back into 52Frames and into the habit of blogging a bit more” shot for this week’s 52Frames with the theme Distortion. My initial goal was to get the crystal ball out and to get a few shots with it, but that didn’t happen 😛 Instead, we were in Graubünden this week-end, and I saw that traffic mirror – I like traffic mirrors 😉 This one isn’t particularly spectacular, but it does have the nice feature of showing the incoming menacing sky against the blue one!
Of note, there was another mirror visible from the first one, but the resulting shot was meh-er.
It’s been a while since I’ve submitted anything to 52Frames, and it’s been a while since I’ve picked up a camera with the objective of “photography” rather than just “remembering something” or “showing something”, and I also want to have more posts on this blog, and and and – anyway, here’s a non-optimal 52Frames shot, for the theme “In The Center“.
The wasp is kind of accidental – I was aiming for a flower picture – but now I do have a wasp in the center of the picture and I thunk that’s actually nice. The picture itself is not great – it’s a phone picture, taken with my hands up while coming back from the gym, it’s not super sharp and I’m not super happy with it. But, it’s a picture, it’s an attempt at getting back into something, and it exists.
I want to pick up photography again − I haven’t touched my camera in a while for Reasons (I’ve done other things! It’s fine!) and it’s at a point where I miss it. I have no idea if it’s going to stick − right now, I had a call with a bunch of photographers last night and I’m super motivated, we’ll see how that goes in the next few weeks 🙂 In the meantime, have some flowers (which are, apparently, trumpet vines). And a wasp. (Fuck wasps, but they are pretty.)
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 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.
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.
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! 😀
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!
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.
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.
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 🙂
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.
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!
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.
And there, another round done! We’ll see how the next one goes 🙂
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:
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.
And the original – not much to be said here except for the exposure/color and crop.
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.)
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.
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length
100mm
F-Number
F/8
Exposure time
1/100 s
ISO
800
Other pictures from my fellow Scavengers: Silhouette
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.
The original, showing the source of most issues: the light was *terrible* (because I hadn’t made the effort to make it right!).
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!
The original was quite close from the final picture, up to exposure and cropping.
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!
The original was less golden-spiraley, but I knew I could make it work on the crop.
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length
100mm
F-Number
F/7.1
Exposure time
1/160 s
ISO
800
Other pictures from my fellow Scavengers: Golden Ratio
