Balise's Blog

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”.

“Paint” was one of these “found shots”. I knew there was multiple places in Zürich with painted façades, so I wasn’t too worried about finding which. It turns out that this mural is on the façade of the Schweizer Heimwerk, a shop that sells “Swiss stuff”, and it seemed like a good idea for my overarching theme. I framed it with the windows, the pipe on the left and the stairs/catwalk in the bottom to give a better sense of location.

Since then, I also looked into the origin of this painting. It was painted in 1939 by Wilhelm Hartung, who also painted numerous other façades in the city (including one very close to my apartment!), and I apparently have a Wikipedia page to translate to French and English 😉

Here’s the original picture I took, from the other side of the Limmat:

Camera	Fujifilm X-30 II
Lens	Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length	88 mm
F-Number	F/6.4
Exposure time	1/100 s
ISO	250

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

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”.

I had another word in mind when I shot around that place, but I still think this works for “Chaotic” – at least when it comes to the chaotic nature of fluid dynamics 😉 This is a reflection of building along the Limmat. I don’t remember the exact timing of this picture, but I remember spending some time chasing reflections, and being very happy when a police motorboat started adding perturbation to the mix. Retrospectively, I kind of regret not cropping that shot in a way that would make it more abstract as it is there, but I think it fits the “Zürich” theme better that way.

Camera	Fujifilm X-30 II
Lens	Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length	56 mm
F-Number	F/9
Exposure time	1/60 s
ISO	800

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

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 “Glass” shot was very much a “I know what I’m going for” type of shot: “Zürich + Glass = Prime Tower”. So I went to the Prime Tower, and spent an hour or so turning around it and taking pictures from all possible angles, with and without polarizer (this one is probably “with”). I finally opted for a fairly typical view of the tower, but I’m happy with the texture of the windows and I think that it’s a good shot – although I regret cropping it that tight on the top edge. Live and learn. There’s not much between the out-of-the-camera shot (below) and my final image:

Camera	Fujifilm X-30 II
Lens	Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length	mm
F-Number	F/13
Exposure time	1/80s
ISO	800

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

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”.

“Texture” was definitely in that second category of “I know where I’m getting that” of shots. Well, first I had to come up with the idea (and what better idea than “chocolate” to represent Zürich as a texture?), but once I had it, I knew… because I made a similar shot five years ago:

These pictures are taken at Teuscher, which has a spectacular display – and that I hadn’t tasted yet. Well, I took the pictures on a Saturday instead of a Sunday for the first one, so this time I actually pushed their door to get a small of truffles, got out with a large box of truffles, a little one and a bag of salted butter caramels – oooops. Totally worth it, though, everything was delicious. I see why they are well-regarded as one of the best addresses in Zürich, Switzerland and the world.

Photography-wise, since I knew what I wanted to do, I also knew I needed a polarizing filter – so that’s my first post-Fuji-buy equipment investment, because OF COURSE I have 3 or 4 polarizing filters already but the Fuji lens’ diameter is not compatible.

Since I wanted “texture”, it kind of meant trying to have as little distractions as possible on the image – in particular avoiding the display shelf line of the pictures 5 years ago. I didn’t take as many shots as I would have liked because it was Saturday an the shop was open and I felt self-conscious, but I still managed to get something I could work with:

Camera	Fujifilm X-30 II
Lens	Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length	56 mm
F-Number	F/6.4
Exposure time	1/25s
ISO	800

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

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”.

“Bridge” was pretty much a given for a “main view” of the city that would come in play for the final “collect your images” picture – I wanted to go for a postcard type of views. I waited for a tram to drive by – because you can’t have a proper view of Zürich without a tram – and took a few pictures. Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t as clear as I would have hoped over the Alps in the background. Even more unfortunately, the weather was much better the next week, I was in that area… and I didn’t think of re-shooting that picture!

Anyway – that’s the original image – it has bluer tones, it’s somewhat crooked, and the background is less visible; those were the main edits on that picture.

Camera	Fujifilm X-30 II
Lens	Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length	18 mm
F-Number	F/6.4
Exposure time	1/100 s
ISO	160

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

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”.

For “Crack”, I was very much in the “looking around to see if I can find something” mode. I was expecting to find it on a wall, but I found it on the floor – that’s a detail from a sidewalk. I liked the geometry of these, and the fact that there was one that was slightly larger than the others.

The initial shot is very, very close from what I submitted:

Camera	Fujifilm X-30 II
Lens	Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length	56 mm
F-Number	F/6.4
Exposure time	1/50 s
ISO	640

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

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:

Camera	Fujifilm X-30 II
Lens	Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length	47 mm
F-Number	F/10
Exposure time	1/100s
ISO	800

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