For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.
One of the word was “Sparkle” – and what’s more sparkling than diamonds? Hence, I had a pretty straightforward theme with the game Diamant. Diamant is a push-your-luck game where players collect gemstones in a dangerous (think Indiana Jones-dangerous) mine. The more they dig, the more they’ll bring home – but if they fall into a trap they don’t bring anything back!
Here’s my original picture:
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length
50 mm
F-Number
F/8
Exposure time
1/80s
ISO
1000
This was most definitely not sparkly enough! Which meant that I need to add some sparkles to my diamonds… which meant that I created my first ever Photoshop brush. I mostly followed this video: Photoshop Tutorial: How to create a Star Brush Set. So I played with that for a while, and then I added a few (okay, a lot) of not-at-all-subtle digital glitter on my gems.
It was a lot of fun, and I’m actually quite happy with the final image!
For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.
For “Float”, I was first playing with the idea of boat/ship themed board games. I could find a few ideas, but nothing necessarily very convincing. Instead, I got out a game that doesn’t see much light these days, namely “Hey, that’s my fish!”, where the ice sheets on which the penguins stand are definitely floating.
In “Hey, that’s my fish”, players control a few penguins that try to feed themselves. They start on an hexagonal grid made of tiles and can move to other tiles in a straight line to arrive on tiles that have 1, 2 or 3 fish. When a penguin leaves a tile, their controlling player picks the tile in their reserve, making the board emptier and emptier… and the penguins’ situation more and more precarious! It’s a fun game, except for two things: 1/ I *always* lose because I suck at it 2/ the setup time is way too long for the game time.
To make the picture, I setup the game and played a few rounds quickly until I got a situation making clear that the penguins are floating on some small pieces of ice. I had setup the game over a sheet of blue gift paper to symbolize some water, and I played around a lot with the different penguins to avoid seeing all the same figures everywhere and whatnot.
This was my original picture:
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length
50mm
F-Number
F/8
Exposure time
1/25 s
ISO
500
I wanted to give more texture to the “blue sea” – so that was my next step after the basic edits. I separated the blue background from the game pieces and played around with Photoshop creative filters until I got what I wanted. I’m somewhat unhappy with the blur because it’s not aligning with the DOF blur of the pieces; I considered fixing it after I noticed it, but I got lazy. Bah, room for improvement for the next ones!
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Float album.
For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.
“Fairy Tales” ended up being a surprisingly hard concept to come to: I had a few games that I could make work with a bit of a stretch on the word, but nothing super convincing. There exists also a game called Fairy Tale, but it’s, as far as I know, out of print, and I do not own a copy. I knew where to borrow one, so it was definitely a backup plan. With the “I don’t have anything that obviously fits” out of the way, I looked at the board game shelves and went through the games one by one. That’s when the Dixit concept hit me.
Dixit is a party/social game that contains a lot of very pretty cards. In a round of Dixit, the current player (the “story teller”) gives a word or a story about a card she has in her hand. All other players provide cards from their hands that fit that word; the goal for them is to find the card that the story teller chose in the collected cards. The goal of the story teller is to have at least one player find her card, but not all of them. The challenge then becomes, for the story teller as well as for the guessers, to find the one card that’s “guessable, but not obvious”… or that has a common enough interpretation to be able to play on the luck factor.
It turns out that “fairy tale” is a fairly common theme in Dixit – I wouldn’t say that it’s a theme that comes at every game, but not far from it. Surprisingly enough, the number of cards that not only evoke, but strongly evoke the word in the whole deck of cards is fairly low. Still, I found a dozen of them, and arranged them around the scoring/guessing board. To represent the scores of the 12 imaginary players, I… threw a die 12 times and put a random bunny on each of the obtained scores 😉
It took me a few attempts to get an angle that I found pleasing, while not displaying too much empty space around the cards, and finding an arrangement of the cards that would make them all at least somewhat visible. This is the original picture (which is significantly messier out of the cropped frame, as you can see 🙂 ), with no particular edits except what was needed to make it presentable 😉
For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.
“Ink” would have been a slam dunk word a couple of Hunts ago – I do have a (now somewhat on the side) calligraphy hobby, and I would have gone that way and taken the opportunity to get my nibs wet, or something like that 😉 If not for the desire to go for an overarching theme, I would probably have done that, or experimented with ink-in-water shots. Instead, I do own a game called Railroad Ink, for which, at least, I have the expectation of having the only picture with that interpretation in the album.
Railroad Ink is essentially a “multiplayer solo game”, in that there is absolutely no interaction between the players during the game. It’s a “roll & write”: a set of dice is rolled every round, and players write stuff on their sheet, and repeat until the game is over (in this case for a set number of rounds.) In this instance of roll & write, the dice represent roads and rails (and lakes and volcanoes with the expansions), and the players compete in making whatever the dice throws at them build the best road & rail network.
For this picture, I played the whole game and counted my score. I had initially managed to mess up the sum and given myself 10 extra points, oops… had to retake the shot after that ;). Then I setup things to show the box, to make the relation to the theme crystal clear, and another player mat to fill in the picture and have a bit more interesting stuff than my table.
The major difficulty was to get proper angles and setup so that the image would look good (and avoid unfortunate @#! reflections); but with this initial picture, the edits were completely straightforward.
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length
50 mm
F-Number
F/11
Exposure time
1/40s
ISO
400
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Ink album.
The theme for 52Frames this week was “Fabric”. I somehow knew exactly what I wanted to do for this topic – I was not expecting that this picture would be so challenging to work with – this was literally headachy! (Don’t stare at it for too long 😛 )
I’ve been wanting to experiment with backgrounds that I could re-use in other pictures and/or play with for different purposes – the “Fabric” topic seemed like a nice fit for that. I took a picture of a striped t-shirt and swirled it in postprocessing; it worked… better than expected, I must say (despite the headache 😛 ). I’m keeping this in mind for future psychedelic backgrounds!
The Unlikely Rise of the French Tacos [text] – I must admit that I didn’t know (or remember?) that “French tacos” were a thing. But this made me smile in a bewildered way all along.
Taking pictures of the Moon is probably Astrophotography 101 in any book – but hey, look at that, I’m a beginner!
I think the first pictures of the Moon that I took were during the lunar eclipse of 2018. Turns out – it’s not a GREAT idea to start there, because, well, it’s significantly harder (because it’s less bright, which makes light problematic, and focus even more so). Still, I did get SOMETHING.
I tried again a month later, and there was only a half-moon up, so again – not making my life easier.
But it felt pretty satisfying, still, and I let that one be for roughly a year. Then, we had the “Moon” theme in the Scavenger Hunt – a good way to revisit the subject! That’s what I had submitted for the Hunt:
This was obviously less in the pure “astrophotography” category and more in the “trying stuff out” category – and I still like that image a lot, for what it’s worth. I still have one cropped shot from this time (that’d be February 2019):
Those were all shots that I did with only my DSLR, a tripod, and a telelens.
Fast-forward a couple of years to, well, now – and it so happens that we have a telescope and a friend who knows how to setup that thing and I have a Pierre who’s interested enough in the whole “so, how does that thing actually WORK” to make it work for me. A few weeks ago, we set it up on the balcony, and I was actually quite impressed with what I was able to get from my phone aligned by my shaky hands on the eyepiece (there’s absolutely zero processing there apart from whatever the phone camera does – which is A LOT and TOO MUCH in other contexts, but that’s another story).
Since that night, I procured a so-called T-ring for my Pentax which allows me to basically use the telescope as a gigantic lens. I did an half-assed attempt on Friday evening; I had focus issues because the live view of my camera was completely blown out, but I still managed to get this one.
And finally, last night, I figured out how to not blow the live view of my camera (the secret was to set the exposure detection as “spot” and not “whole picture”). Pierre also managed to setup the lunar tracking on the telescope mount, which helped tremendously. I took several pictures, and I played around with their stacking/processing in Planetary system Stacker (and Lightroom for the final image).
And, I must say, I’m quite happy with the end result. I definitely want to try to experiment a bit more with that setup (and probably shoot at 1/400 instead of 1/500, 1/500 is a bit dark) and try to stack a bit more images (this one is a stack of 8 out of 20), but this pleases me 🙂
Next step is to try to find another interesting, deeper space object that’s visible from my balcony, both in terms of “angle” and “luminosity considering I’m, well, still in a city 😉 The Orion nebula was an option earlier in the month, but I think it’s now too bright outside when it would be visible/not hidden by the building 😛
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Nature”, with an extra credit for “Use a tripod”. We setup the telescope a few weeks ago, but there’s been a conjunction of “not having the correct adapter” and “weather is stupid” that meant that I had not tried to take pictures with my DSLR on the telescope yet.
Yesterday evening, I had the correct adapter and the weather was nice – so I tried to fiddle a bit with the equipment. It’s far from perfect – for one thing, the focus was a lot of click&pray (I need to see how to do that properly – I have the theory, I miss a crucial part on my camera interface, and it was dark last night); still, this is my best shot of the moon so far, I think.
And, well, astrophotography was explicitly in theme, and the scope mount definitely counts as “tripod”, so there, I have a picture for this week!
The “Edited by someone else” is a staple of 52Frames every year: you take a picture, and you leave the creative wheel to someone else for the edits. The “someone else” can be someone you know, or there’s a handy spreadsheet where people put their name and how much they’re willing to edit, and all in all it works very well (I edited for one person, and I asked someone to edit for me).
My picture was edited by Dirk Bergstrom – and I’m happy with what he did with it 😉 I had provided three pictures of the same chocolate cake, thinking he could go with the one he preferred. He was nice enough to provide me with two edits of two different pictures – here’s the other one:
I like it too, but I thought the first one was more intriguing.
And, for the record, with the same base as the first one, this is my own edit:
The whole “Edited by someone else” theme requires a bit more logistic and is somewhat more stressful than the usual 52Frames themes – but I always find the exercise very interesting 🙂
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Trapped”. I would expect a lot of conceptually darker images in this album; I decided I didn’t want to do that because my mood really didn’t need that kind of thing right now.
So I played around with the idea of board games – there’s a lot of situations where, as a player, you feel trapped either by previous bad decisions or by bad luck. I was first considering abstract games like go or chess – except I don’t play any of these (and I don’t own boards for them!) Connect4 or Tic-Tac-Toe would have been an option too. A couple of other ideas came to my mind – a player getting its road cut at Ticket to Ride, or a territory getting disconnected at Terra Mystica – but that felt too “niche” to convey the concept to a greater audience.
I settled for Monopoly – and that sinking feeling of “well, I just rolled the pair of dice that sent me to jail”. I don’t particularly enjoy Monopoly, but as concept illustration, it can actually go a long way!
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