I knew I wouldn’t have much opportunity to take my 52Frames picture this week, so this one is kind of placeholder. The theme was Reflections, with “Mirror” as extra credit – which I claimed. We were traveling by car earlier this week (a fairly rare thing), and I snapped this on the Autobahn. And, for a phone snapshot without edit, I think I got lucky. The electric lines that lead to the mirror feel PARTICULARLY lucky.
It’s not a great or even a good shot, but it’s a shot, I still have my streak, and getting closer and closer to get the full streak for 2020, which would be nice 🙂
Round is the last image I got for this Hunt, and it’s my favorite one! It’s weird, it’s nerdy (there was a strong HAL 9000 inspiration.) And I could take bets on people having no idea how I made that image, and…. that makes me weirdly happy 😛
The whole process started, funnily enough, with the lens. It kind of popped in my mind that my camera is a full-frame camera, and that I do have a couple of lenses that do not cover the whole sensor. Hence: very strong, round, black vignetting. I started playing with what I had, and came to the conclusion that the strongest vignetting I could get was with the 18-55 at 18mm. This made things a bit awkward, because it’s a wide aperture… and at this point, I also had vaguely in the idea that I wanted to use my crystal ball – which is not that large (but which is round) too.
I then rummaged into my collection of random stuff, and I ended up with the following props:
A tube that’s a bit bigger than my crystal ball, a couple of tape rolls that are EXACTLY the right width to serve as crystal ball support, and one of my faithful Lume cubes with color filters. Well. It actually started with no filter, and then a green filter, and when I looked into the first images, I excitedly went “WAIT IF I TAKE A RED FILTER I CAN DO HAL”, so from there I had a precise direction.
It also took me a few attempts to setup everything in a way that made sense (I initially didn’t have the tape supports either) and to finally just plop the camera on top of the tube to make a tunnel and see what I would get there.
The final hurdle was the strong magenta reflection that’s still a bit visible in the image I submitted, but that I decided I could live with. I tried to fixed that one by trying to orient things differently and playing with the white balance, but without much success.
I had a lot of fun making this image; and it might actually only completely make sense in the context of a SOOC challenge! Still, I couldn’t resist the temptation to do an edit from RAW to see what I can get from my image source 😉 And to see that that stupid magenta fringe was an artifact of processing of my camera! I hadn’t expected that. And if you think I wouldn’t take the opportunity of the postprocessing to edit a brighter spot in the middle, think, think again 😉
And for the final album of the reveals on the Scavenger side: Round.
I’m lucky enough to live near a lake that sees a fair amount of boat traffic, so I was not too worried about the Boats theme – I knew it wouldn’t be the most original shot, but I knew I could probably get a decent shot at least. I went on a walk during the Hunt time specifically to get a few shots that I knew I could get along the way. I ended up walking more than I thought I would, but it was a very pleasant walk, so win-win.
I ended up with A Lot of candidates for my Boats shot. For the SOOC constraint, I liked this one best: it’s colorful, there’s a nice reflection, the framing is… reasonable – although I don’t like that I see a bit of the nearby Badi on the top-left corner, and I think cropping would have helped getting the shot I wanted.
If not for the SOOC constraint, I probably would have tried to get a “cropable” image of this one with a shorter focal length and hoped for the best. As it is, it is still one of my favorite shots in the multiple that I have for this theme; I would either have gone back to get a better framing or more probably gone for a tighter crop in post, and probably been somewhat unsatisfied with the shot in general 😀
Metal is an instance of a picture that’s somewhat weak on the theme, but that I couldn’t resist including in my Hunt set because I loved it so much. I’m not even sure WHY I love it so much – but when I reviewed the set for that day, there was definitely an audible “oh!”.
The annoying thing is that I had a FANTASTIC find for the theme, but none of the pictures were remotely as good, at least in SOOC. There’s a botanical collection of succulent plants in Zürich, and this picture was taken behind that building. And a few meters away, there’s a bunch of metallic cactus sculptures. I spent a significant amount of time trying to get a good shot of these – but they’re stuck in an awkard place not far from a fairly busy road, so I didn’t manage to make a SOOC image work 😦 Not to mention that it was a very bright day and that there was literally no shade around at all, which didn’t help either.
If not for the SOOC constraint, I may have submitted this one:
I think it’s a better fit, but the non-edited version felt fairly bland. I also think that I may have shot differently without the SOOC constraint: I would have trusted that I could crop and turn things around, and I would probably have gotten larger angle shots with the hope of getting SOMETHING that I could use. I might go back to that place at some point, because these were fun to photograph!
And, for more pictures of the same word, the Scavenger album: Metal.
Path is probably one of the pictures I like less for this Hunt. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s a bad picture, but it’s somewhat uninspired and bland. This is a path near the river not far for my place, and it’s actually fairly rare to manage to catch it that empty: there’s usually a large amount of pedestrians and bikes trying to share it with or without grumbling 🙂
That’s mostly the reason why the framing is slightly “offset” compared to what I’d try to usually do (I think) – I didn’t want to be in the way, so I settled on the side on the path and started shooting. I took a fair amount of pictures, trying different combinations of depth of field and focus; I ended up liking the ones with the smallest aperture best, because the tree in the foreground was sharper and it felt better to not focus explicitly on said tree, so, there.
With the SOOC constraint, my major difficulty was to manage both framing and a picture that’s not crooked; I had pictures that I liked better in my set but that would have required some editing, so they were out by definition.
If not for the SOOC constraint, I might have gone for this:
This one is actually a composite. The person is in another picture – for which the whole picture was softer and the framinig was meh-er, but I really liked the idea of having someone there; and I also liked that the person was looking at the water (that I know to be behind the trees 🙂 ) and not simply walking. It was a no-no as it was, but comp’d with the one I submitted, it would have made it better 🙂
(Hi, my name is Balise and I’m compositing pictures for “what ifs” in a SOOC challenge 😀 )
And for the album of my fellow Scavenger fellows, follow the Path 🙂
With the list of words that we had for this round, the idea of a broken egg took place in my mind and never moved away from it. So I broke an egg on a reasonable surface, and I started shooting. I had started shooting hand-held, but after a few shots it became obvious that I wanted more depth of field than I could shoot handheld (and not compensate for in post), so I sighed, got the tripod out, and continued shooting.
Nothing much to say about this shot – it’s was basically a matter of “taking a lot of them and choose the best one”. If I remember correctly I did add a lume cube (or maybe a led panel? I’m not sure anymore!) as a secondary source of light, but that was pretty much it.
I would have gone for the same base picture if not for the SOOC constraint, but I would have edited a bit to remove the reflection in the back (which I find distracting) and boost a bit the reflection of the egg shell.
I did a main photo walk during this Hunt that yielded me 5 pictures – which is a great score 😉 Water was actually one that I expected to get, considering where I was going, but I had no strong idea about what I wanted to do. I found the top arches of a ladder going into the lake and decided to play with it for a while. Of all the pictures that I took, this was my favorite under the SOOC constraint.
I have a fondness for images that imply the word by their absence, or that obviously fit the word without making it obvious, or that make the word central but still subtle, if that makes any sense. And because of that, I’m actually very fond of that image, even if it may have fit another theme better (but I think I would have liked it less for the other theme 🙂 ).
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was Food photography. I used to do quite a lot of food/kitchen photography-related photography a few years ago; I don’t do it nearly as much now, but I still have some taste (pun intended) for it.
I knew that there would be baking this week-end (it’s my husband’s birthday 😉 ), so I waited for that and followed him in the kitchen with my camera. When it comes to food photography, I always preferred the “action” shots to the “food stylist” pictures – less pretty, for sure, but more realistic 😉
The light in the kitchen this afternoon was fairly bad – although we have great natural light in this room, the weather is pretty gloomy, and our lighting is not up to photography tasks, and I got wayyyy to lazy to add some proper lights in the way of the baking (for which I wasn’t responsible!). I’m still quite happy with the overall mood I managed to get with that shot – and I like the texture of the pie. It’s not an AMAZING picture, but I don’t hate it 😉
Okay, this was FUN. It took me a little while to remember that we had a LEGO model of the Seattle Space Needle somewhere – so that gave me a direction. (It missed the top part, so I hadto rummage into my LEGO collection to find a way to fix it, that also took a little while, but I think it works.)
Then came the “okay, how do I set this up” question. I wanted some kind of skyline behind it, because it felt right – if only to give the “city” context that may help with the “Seattle” context (because otherwise the whole “Needle” part may be hard to see!). It turns out that Zürich is not exactly rich in skylines view. I might have been able to pull it off somehow, buuuut. If it hadn’t been a SOOC challenge, I might have gone for a composite of some kind… but, well, SOOC means no composite.
Unless…….
A few months ago, I had seen a video about the filming of The Mandalorian: the green screen had been replaced by huge screens and… pretty much used as it was filmed. I suppose it popped back in my mind when I went “waaaait. I could have that skyline displayed on my monitor, that… should work, right?”. I never went to Seattle, but I do have skylines pictures – get a bit of Boston, as seen from Cambridge 😉 I actually quite like using the skyline from another city: it’s my kind of cheeky, I guess. Here’s what the setup looked like:
You’ll note the creativity in the pile of stuff that I put under the Space Needle 😉
Then came the second guessing – was that… cheating? The Boston picture has definitely been taken a long time ago (and outside of the Scavenger Hunt dates, obviously), and that one HAD been processed. But, hey, it’s an original picture that uses practical special effects to achieve a SOOC picture within the theme 😉 And, as a nice bonus surprise, the reflection in the tower in the back works pretty well with the Needle in the front
Now, I’m not COMPLETELY happy with that image – in particular, the Needle is a bit crooked, which is unfortunate. I had images with a better verticality, but the border of the screen was visible… which I only saw after I had put everything back in its place 😦 Still, that’s… very much the same concept, with a tiny bit of cropping and cleaning up.
And for the album of my fellow Scavengers: Needle (careful, some of these are scary 😀 )
The “In-camera motion blur” item of the list was the topic of some pretty entertaining debates about what constitutes “in-camera”, what constitutes “motion blur”, and what constitutes “in-camera motion blur”. And technically, my first idea of the word was to go take pictures of moving trains, which would have been motion blur, but not in the way it was meant 😉 My final interpretation of the word ended up being “A picture where the camera is intentionally moved during exposure”, and that’s what I did.
I had noticed this long walking tunnel a few months ago as “a place where there’s probably a way to play with a camera”, and I was thinking about it for another word. And then I started playing indeed, wondered if I could do something with the motion blur, spent a fair amount of time looking weird taking pictures of a tunnel while moving, zooming, and generally speaking trying to get some interesting picture. I liked this one most because of the faint presence of the woman walking – I thought it added a bit of interest (although she’s not necessarily that visible on first glance.)
This may be the one where I regretted the SOOC constraint most, because as it is, it lacks some contrast, I think; but I’m writing that sentence before I try editing it, so let’s see what I can do with it now!
And you know what? I kind of like it. It’s very different from what I’d usually go for – hell, it may be the first time I ADD grain to an image, but I think it actually works as an image.
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