Category: Photography

Scavenger Hunt #29 – Egg

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CameraPentax K-1 II
Lenssmc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mmF2.8 WR
Focal length100mm
F-NumberF/16
Exposure time1/20 s
ISO400

For a theme as “concrete” as “Egg”, I like to try to extract a somewhat “abstract” interpretation of the image. Macro/close-up is an easy way to do that, and that’s how my Eggs turned out. I basically took the box of eggs out of the fridge, set up a tripod, played with lights, and started shooting. Condensation started to appear pretty quickly, and I thought it added an interesting texture on the eggs – although it took me a few tries to get the light right. The egg carton also gave an interesting texture – I was happy to manage to focus reasonably on it.

I think that without the SOOC constraint I would probably have handled this one in B&W. From the same set of pictures, I think I would have submitted this one:

I think the light was slightly better, but I’ve had to fix the angles and crop before getting this one. And I also fixed a couple of imperfections that I’m probably the only one seeing 😉 I’m pretty sure I would have convinced myself that B&W was the right choice to emphasize the abstract, buuut I think I like the color one better now!

And the album with all the pictures of my Scavenger Hunt fellows is here: Egg.

Scavenger Hunt #29 – Coffee

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CameraPentax K-1 II
Lenssmc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mmF2.8 WR
Focal length100mm
F-NumberF/13.0
Exposure time5 s
ISO100

Coffee was the first shot that I got for the Hunt, just after I got the 100mm macro lens (which, by the way, I love to bits.) It took A LOT of takes before getting something I was satisfied with – and even here, the fact that the chocolate is not fully in focus is a bit sad, I think.

The major hurdle with shooting liquids is that they tend to splatter – especially when dropped from some height, as it is on my coffee machine; it took a fair amount of careful cleaning to get the espresso foam line reasonably clean without destroying it. My first shots also didn’t have a spoon; it took a while to get the spoon in at the right angle for the picture. All the things that I could have fixed in postprocessing were obviously to be fixed in camera for a SOOC challenge!

But eventually, the stars aligned enough that I decided that it was good enough; this felt like a fairly long picture session, but I like the final image!

The edited version of the same concept would be something like this:

(And yes, the chocolate got composited from a picture where it was sharper 😉 )

And the full album of my Scavenger fellows is here: Coffee.

Scavenger Hunt #29 – What do you mean, SOOC?

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The time for the 29th Scavenger Hunt reveals is almost upon us – so I prepared 10 posts (11 if I include this one) to present what I did – with a bit of context, behind the scenes, etc etc 🙂

This round, dubbed “Back to Basics”, had a very specific rule: no edits. No crop, no color fixing, no fixing of That Pesky Fleck Of Dust That I’ve Been Removing In Postproc For Months Now, nothing. Straight Out Of the Camera – SOOC. Granted, the interpretation of “SOOC” has been interesting, especially since there’s a bunch of smart-asses in the Scavengers community (as a card-bearing smart-ass, I would know 😉 ), and the “is this and that and possibly that allowed and what constitutes an edit?” started flying in the minutes following the announcement of the SOOC rule.

The “somewhat-agreed-upon” interpretation of the rule has been “whatever your camera, whatever it is, dumps as a JPG if you don’t apply creative filters on it”. Setting the white balance was fair game; setting the camera as B&W was not 🙂 So I setup my camera back in RAW+JPG for the duration of the Hunt (I had been shooting “only RAW” for a few months, finally realizing that… I never used the JPG in practice), and there we go.

This has been an interesting hunt. I spent far more time shooting the “studio” shots to get them Just Right – I definitely summoned my inner perfectionist (she’s hiding somewhere, I promise!) The thing is – since I had taken the habit in the past few hunts of showing a small “before/after”, well – this doesn’t work as well this time around. There are still a couple of non-trivial shots in there where the “behind the scenes” is somewhat justified; and for all of them, I went for “This is what I submitted / This is what I would have submitted otherwise”.

So… ready for the reveals? As I’m typing this, the pictures in the top image are blurred and the list of words is empty; I intend to come back to this post and update it as I go. But if you see this in its first iteration… well, you’ll have to wait a bit!

The list:

52Frames – 2020-41 – Shoot through

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My initial plan was to try and go on a walk, possibly with my crystal ball, for the “Shoot Through” theme. But I’ve been quite busy this week and this week-end, and ended up without having shot anything on Sunday evening. Thankfully, I have LEGO 😉 The shot started with having a look at a minifig and a transparent pane – and getting the idea of the counter/window. From there, it took me a little time to figure out the right heights and the right construct, and to think of adding a ceiling to the scene (which is not very visible, but it looked weird without it – the construction and the setup were definitely longer than the camera time 😉

52Frames – 2020-40 – Blue

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The theme for 52Frames this week was Blue. I tried different approaches but they were either not looking good or not blue enough; I’m not suuuuper convinced by this shot, but this is the best I have and I was out of ideas to make it better. So, there, have some curaçao.

And yes, I bought a bottle of curaçao because this week’s theme was Blue.

52Frames – 2020-39 – Use a Tripod

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The theme for 52Frames this week was “Use a Tripod”, with a side of “Create a composite”. Since I started using the Adobe tools, I hadn’t tested the focus stacking yet – so I fixed that.

This image is a composite of 40 exposures – taken, as expected, with a tripod and fixed exposure. The whole process of “importing/aligning/stacking” was handled by Photoshop in a very satisfying and automatic manner – I love it when a plan comes together. It did take a few minutes for each step, but for 40 high-res, non-compressed, frames, I would have half expected the whole thing to crash violently, so… I’ll absolutely take that 🙂

The stacked image made deeply and painfully obvious that I had been more than sloppy with preparing my background: it was VERY dusty. Nothing that was not fixable with fairly minimal effort, though.

And there, we have (focus-)stacks of coins!

52Frames – 2020-38 – A Chair

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The theme for 52Frames this week was A Chair. I’ll admit this is mostly a “placeholder shot” – took it today after 6PM “urgh, haven’t done 52Frames yet, I need to fix that”. We got a couple of balcony chairs since last year (and congratulating ourselves for them every day 😉 ); since they have a meshy texture, I thought it could be fun to take a picture of one through the second one. And, there.

52Frames – 2020-37 – Single Focal Point

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The theme for 52Frames this week was Single Focal Point, with an extra credit of f/1.4. Pierre made some pie this afternoon – so I took the liberty of bothering him with my camera while he was doing that.

Since I wanted the extra credit, I took my only lens that’s able to open to f/1.4, which is a non-macro 50mm, which made focusing somewhat difficult: I have been shooting with a macro lens a lot lately, and this one has a much longer focusing distance! But eventually, I got there.

I ended up taking 300 pictures – and the one I chose was the last one 😉 So I guess I’m titling this one “Finishing touch” – that’s the last piece of pear that goes on that pie! Oh, and if you want the recipe for the pie, my husband wrote it down 15 years ago in French here: Tarte poire / frangipane / chocolat 😉

52Frames – 2020-36 – Combine three challenges

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The 52Frames challenge this week was to “Combine three challenges” – with the list of the previous challenges for this year thankfully provided. I’ve been trying to keep the list in my mind for most of the week because I knew that I needed to think about what I wanted to do. I went through several ideas, but in the end I guess that a couple of things clicked.

I’ve done enough portrait/self-portraits to be very annoyed at stray hair; so for once I really wanted to embrace these. And by that, I mean that I did brush my hair a lot so that they’d get more electric and have more texture.

I’m also currently watching Glee, and in one of the episodes that I watched this week, there was someone who was backlit on a dark background, and it did make me go “huh. I should try that.” The places where you find new things to try 😉

Anyway – I started playing with a spot, a tripod and a black curtain, with the objective of shooting 1/ Self-Portrait 2/ Low-Key 3/ A Different Angle. And I guess that we have bonus Details and Negative Space in there too 🙂

52Frames – 2020-35 – A Common Object

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The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “A common object”, with an extra credit for “One light source”. So I locked myself in my room, closed the door and blinds, got a Lume cube and a pair of earphones (which I thought would yield both some texture and some shape), and got to work.

It took me a little while to find the “right” angle – suspending the earphones on top of the light ended up being the right move for me.