Category: Photography

For the 32nd Scavenger Hunt, I had decided (even before the Hunt words were public!) to try to make a series with wooden manikins. For Lamp, I thought it’d be nice to do something around the most famous animated lamp there is – and I decided to make my manikin cosplay for it! The major difficulty was to pose him in a way close enough from the lamp’s posture. But then, obviously it wasn’t a stable position, so I had to add some tape on his feet to make it stand still.

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	1/40 s
ISO	125

This meant that I needed to get a picture of non-taped feet – which I did by taking another picture against a few cans and taping, this time, the head of the manikin 😉

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	1/40 s
ISO	320

And, for good measure, I also took a picture of the metal surface in case I needed more metal texture.

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	1/40 s
ISO	640

Once I had that, the process took a bit of time, but wasn’t particularly complicated. I created the first composite of the manikin, its feet and its reflection in the metallic surface, with the blue color toning. The lamp is a few colored circles overlaid on the picture. Add some letters, shadows, light – as well as I could, and tadaaa! A picture ready for entry!

There’s actually not much I’d do differently right now with this picture. The shadows/reflections of the letters are not the most natural things in the world, but they’re not distracting to me. The “lamp” with the concentric circles is very simple, but I think it conveys the idea better than if I had gone with a fancier way of adding it. All in all, this is one of my favorite entries for this round 🙂

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

For the 32nd Scavenger Hunt, I had decided (even before the Hunt words were public!) to try to make a series with wooden manikins. We had the Leaf theme some rounds ago – which yielded one of my favorite images ever from a fellow Scavenger (hi Dave!). I considered, somewhat in the same directions, to play around the Adam and Eve theme, and ended up deciding against that. Instead, I made a “leafitation” picture! It’s a pretty straightforward levitation composite. First step, background:

Second step, levitating object.

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	Sigma 28mm f/1.8 EX Aspherical DG DF Macro
Focal length	28mm
F-Number	F/7.1
Exposure time	1/8 s
ISO	400

And third step, editing the composite, adding a shadow, etc. I also added a movement blur on the background to give an impression of panning.

I’m not entirely happy with this composite. Adding the shadow on the ground helped selling it, but I think I overdid it and that it’s too dark. I also have no idea how the shadow and the background blur should have played together, and I’m not convinced I made the right choices there. The manikin/wall delimitation also feels too sharp at places, especially around the leaf. I also have no idea if I did the blur in the right direction and, well, if I can’t make the difference, does it matter? (yes, yes it does 😉 )

I’m still very happy with the idea, which I find whimsical and funny. Adding the panning was definitely a good idea because it adds to the story-telling. I was also quite happy with the idea of using the stem of the leaf as a “navigating stick” of some sort!

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

For the 32nd Scavenger Hunt, I had decided (even before the Hunt words were public!) to try to make a series with wooden manikins. For the “Kitchen utensil” word, my first idea was to have my manikins chasing each other with a rolling pin, but I decided against it because this actually not an image I want to make, as pervasive in the social imaginary as it may be. I also considered bathing one in a pot, or something like that, but I didn’t want to sacrifice one just yet, and I had little hopes of being able to recover it after that.

I eventually settled on the idea that I could use the kitchen utensil as a prop and not necessarily as the main focus in that picture. I have an overly large cocktail spoon, whose scale is interesting compared to the manikin’s size, and a cocktail mixing glass – there we go, I had my idea! I wanted to make something akin to a cauldron, which obviously meant something green and vaguely shiny.

I got the idea of preparing the green mixture with some water, a bit of green coloring, and a few drops of milk to give it some opacity. I then took several pictures in a dark room, illuminated by a single Lume cube. I ended up having a few more pictures of that type, moving the cube further or closer:

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	Sigma 28mm f/1.8 EX Aspherical DG DF Macro
Focal length	28mm
F-Number	F/7.1
Exposure time	0.8 s
ISO	640

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	Sigma 28mm f/1.8 EX Aspherical DG DF Macro
Focal length	28mm
F-Number	F/7.1
Exposure time	0.8 s
ISO	200

I loaded them all into Lightroom, told it “make me an HDR out of these”, and it resulted in the above image, give or take a few edits on the fabric and the like.

I kind of regret not giving more thought/ideas to the background: it might have been better with a bit more flair. I am, however, exceedingly happy with how the bright green liquid turned out, and I’m also very happy with the light in this image. All in all, I like it a lot!

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Kitchen utensil album.

For the 32nd Scavenger Hunt, I had decided (even before the Hunt words were public!) to try to make a series with wooden manikins. That made things Interesting when I saw that one of the words was “broccoli” – how was I supposed to make that work? Thankfully, I got the idea of Broccoli-Man pretty quickly and, once I had the idea, the implementation was…. almost straightforward.

I first shot my manikin in a “super-hero pose” and a broccoli at a reasonable height (that took a few attempts).

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	Sigma 28mm f/1.8 EX Aspherical DG DF Macro
Focal length	28mm
F-Number	F/8
Exposure time	1/25s
ISO	320

And then, Photoshop to the rescue – blend in the images, play with the color toning, done, right? Eeeh. The processing was less straightforward than I would have liked, for a few reasons.

• The removal of the metallic stand ended up being more annoying than expected.
• I should really invest in a small green screen to make its removal easier, that would make my life significantly easier.
• Relatedly to that point, I “fixed” the issue of the background by blurring the wall behind… and not realizing that my selection was far from perfect, which meant going back for more, more awkward edits.
• My Lightroom-to-Photoshop-to-Lightroom process is dubious at best and my handling of Photoshop files is laughable (it seems my layers and whatnot are actually stored in a TIF file, which is highly suspicious and probably WRONG ON SO MANY LEVELS…) – I’ll need to see how to properly do that for the next Hunt.
• The merge of the broccoli and the manikin texture at the neck level took me a long time, and is still not up to what I would have liked to get (which may be… difficult! 🙂 ).

Now that I’m writing this behind-the-scenes post, I also realize that there’s a bit of a “halo” (coming from the blur effect) around the manikin, but not around the broccoli head, which is a bit sad. I’m also a bit annoyed that I didn’t think of giving him a cape too – but oh well – next time, maybe!

I’m still happy with a number of things in this picture:

• The concept amuses me greatly.
• I really like the posing of the manikin.
• I made my life easy for the composite taking pictures at the right level and with the same light and whatnot.
• I’m very happy with the color toning (and I discovered how to do the wood coloring in PS, which makes me happy!).

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