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.
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.
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.
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!
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 😉
Resizing Images for a Twitter Stream [text]- this goes in the “useful tip” category. I’ve had issues with adding borders to images to get them to a certain size; I have various methods that DO work, but I really like the command line approach. ImageMagick FTW.
The Salty Death Of My Trusty Camera [photos, text] – Dave lost his camera in a salty water accident, which is sad, but his blog post is funny, so it’s less sad.
In that AMA, she talked about Simon Stålenhag [images]- who does oil-painting-looking retro-futuristic illustrations, which I do find utterly fascinating. He happens to have a Kickstarter running right now.
LEGO IDEAS – Earth Globe [text, images]- Lego is going to make a globe from the IDEAS project. As a fan of both globes and Lego, I’m very tempted. And so much potential for random worldbuilding 😀
Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record [text] – there exists an easy polynomial algorithm that approximates the metric Traveling Salesperson Problem within a factor 3/2 (like, explaining the proof fully takes maybe half an hour on a blackboard?). For a few decades, it was also the best known. Apparently, now there’s a claim to do fractionally better (and it spans a few dozens of pages 😛 )
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.
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