Category: Photography

Scavenger Hunt #34 – Macro

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Close-up of the mouth of a water fountain

My goal with Hunt 34 was to do something closer to a “real” Scavenger Hunt and to take all my shots outside in the city. I have a mix of “found shots” and “places I know where I’ll be able to take a shot” for this round, and that felt pretty good. I also have a new, more compact camera than my Pentax “monster” – so I also wanted the opportunity to shoot with it more and get more comfortable with it: my other goal for this Hunt was “everything shot with the Fuji”.

The “Macro” shot did not start well. I wanted to go for another word and hope for the best for other words of the list, so I took my camera, hopped on the bus, and went to my destination. I had the rest of the list in my mind, and I ran into something that COULD have worked for Macro. So I took the camera out of the bag, and I got a sinking feeling that got confirmed a few seconds later when I lit on the camera: no memory card 😭 So I walked home feeling stupid, and grumbled a lot.

But, somehow, I managed to pick myself up an hour or two later, thinking “I am going to go back outside with the camera, and we’ll see what happens”. And, in the meantime, I had had a proper idea for the “macro” shot. Now, on the Fuji, I don’t have a macro lens (…… yet 😉). Hence, I went with a bit of a larger interpretation there – many people use “macro” as a synonym for “close-up”, and I decided it’d be good enough for me. Technically wrong, but socially acceptable, I guess 😉 I was consequently looking for something that was small enough to work as a close-up, and still be typical of Zürich. Switzerland has fresh water fountains EVERYWHERE. And the city of Zürich itself, apparently, has 1200 of them – so it felt like a nice idea to consider the mouth of such a fountain. I left the apartment (again…) with my camera, INCLUDING A MEMORY CARD, and a Lume cube because the daylight was starting to fade, and I did a small round of the three fountains in my vicinity I could think of (I found a fourth one since!) before I settled on this one.

The Lume cube got handy to give some texture to the water; I’m also quite happy with both the focus and depth of field of that image. As a “Macro” image, I’ll admit it’s a bit weak; but for me it still has a story behind it, and I’m happy about that.

That’s the original, out of the camera picture:

Wider, lower-exposed, unprocessed picture of the close-up of the mouth of a water fountain
CameraFujifilm X-30 II
LensFujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length47 mm
F-NumberF/10
Exposure time1/100s
ISO800

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

52Frames – 2022-04 – Black&White Photography

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Black and white photography of the Prime Tower in Zürich. The Sun visible on the lower left side of the picture distributes a large amount of bubble-like lens flares all around the image.

The theme for this week’s 52Frames is “Black&White Photography”. I was around the Prime Tower this afternoon and took a few pictures. On this one, I accidentally experimented with lens flare too. I thought they looked kind of cool, so I explicitly made them pop more during the post-processing – in which I also tried to have nice window texture!

52Frames – 2022-04 – Minimalist

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The start of a sprint track - a red surface on which six numbered corridors are painted in white.

The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Minimalism”. I was at the local athletic ground earlier today with my camera for Other Photographic Project Reasons, and I figured that the numbers on the track (pun intended) could be a nice “minimalist” shot. I took a few of these, at different places (there’s three or four such numberings for the corridors all along the track), and I ended up liking this one best. And then, when I started editing, I realized the track was definitely more worn out at the start than after that, which I thought made for a nice bit of story-telling.

52Frames – 2022-03 – Complementary colors

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Bromeliad seen from above, on a black background

The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Complementary colors”. It turns out that I have a beautiful new house plant that has red and green leaves – so let’s go!

After trying to get a properly sharp picture by hand-holding the camera, as usual I gave up and got the tripod out, and even had to set up the electronic shutter on top of the remote because that thing is NOT stable when the camera is looking down – I have a tripod whose central column can be turned horizontal, but it’s very wiggly in that position. It took a bit of processing to get a clean black background, to remove a couple of sadder leaves, and to get rid of the (white) plant pot. But there, I have a shot 🙂

52Frames – 2022-02 – Hello from…

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Night photography of a row of trees in the fog. The street light give a yellow hue to the tree "tunnel".

The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Hello from…”, which is usually interpreted as “take a picture from around where you are this week”. I titled mine “Hello from… the fog!” – we had glorious fog yesterday evening, and I went for a short walk to clear my head fairly late in the evening. When I left home, I considered taking a camera with me, and decided against it: it felt like my phone and the gigantic amount of automatic processing would do a better work than I would trying to stabilize things in these kind of circumstances. I think it was the right call: I played around with and without the night mode, and I got a few cool shots, including this one – taken with the night mode.

52Frames – 2022-01 – Self-portrait

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Self-portrait; a woman wearing a Doctor Who swirly t-shirt standing in front of a black background.

It’s a tradition: the first week of the year in the 52Frames project is “Self-portrait”. This year, the extra challenge (which I claimed) was to use Rembrandt lighting. So, for once, I knew I had to setup proper studio lights before I started, so I did that:

A photography setup showing a camera on a tripod, a high bright light on the left and a lower dimmer light on the right.

The setup didn’t require much adjustment / takes: I did raise the camera more than it was in the first takes, and I also dimmed the left light compared to what it initially was. I also learnt to pose myself by facing slightly the dimmer light, which worked better than the initial takes where I didn’t have that consideration.

Edits were somewhat less straightforward than desired, because the black background (… the curtains in that room 😉 ) are slightly reflective, and the initial version was a bit distracting.)

And, there we go, first shot of the year – we’ll see where that goes 🙂

52Frames – 2021-52 & 2021-53

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Close-up of popcorn

For the two last challenges of year 2021, I went for the “lazy” option – not being home and not having my proper computer to edit decided that for me, essentially.

For the 2021-52 challenge, the theme was “Combine Three Challenges” – I went for three themes that went well together, namely Details, Texture and Fill the Frame, and made a picture of the bowl of popcorn in the kitchen.

A green field, blue sky with a lot of plane trails and light clouds, bright sun.

The 2021-53 theme was “Break the rules”. My first idea was to do a tongue-in-cheek picture of a “No photography allowed” sign, but it would have meant actually making and setting up the sign, and I got a case of the lazies. We went for an afternoon walk, and I purposely snagged that snapshot – breaking both the rule of “don’t shoot directly at the sun” and “don’t put your horizon line in the middle of the picture”; I also broke the meta-rule of “don’t upload 52Frames from your phone” 😉

And with that, I have finished 53 out of 53 pictures in 2021, finishing 52Frames for the second year in a row – let’s see if we can get a third year in a row!

52Frames – 2021-51 – In The Middle

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Two hands pulling on a green therapy band held by a pull-up bar in front of a door.

It’s Sunday evening and I have two things to do: my 52Frames, and my physio. I decided to combine both and take a picture of my physio; obviously, I got taken by “but I need more light” and “but the composition is not right” – which means I have now done my 52Frames, but not my physio yet.

The theme was “In The Middle”, so I went for a centered, hopefully reasonably symmetrical composition. It turns out that the lamps in our corridor are NOT centered compared to the door, which was making the shadow (even) more awkward than it is on this picture. Hence, I present you the “behind the scenes” of this shot, also called “The Things You Do For Art”:

Selfie with a Lume cube held on my head thanks to a Gorillapod.

For a “quick shot”, this still involved a tripod, a timer, two lights (including the one on my head – the other one to light my arms from below). I’m not entirely satisfied with the composition, which is sloppier than I’d like, nor with the focus, which could have a longer depth and probably a better focal point. But, it’s 22.30 on a school night, and trying to get a completely clean shot under the conditions of being both the photographer and the model is… probably the best I can do for this shot at this time 🙂

52Frames – 2021-50 – Black&White Minimalism

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The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Black&White minimalism”, with an extra credit for “Portrait”. When putting these two things together, I knew I wanted to go for something where only the face/elements of the face would be visible. My initial concept was to try to have something where the only visible elements would be a few face features, blurring the rest to white – but it felt kind of hard to pull off. (I might still play with that idea later, but that was not for today!).

Conversely, adding the hands to the portrait feels like it adds something to the composition, compared to not seeing them at all, while keeping with the “minimalist” theme.

Anyway, I took pictures of myself in front of a dark curtain, with a single right pointing at my face (I’ll admit that editing the picture was a bit tough as long as I still had remanent spots in my eyes ;)) and that’s the picture for this week.