Essen SPIEL 2022

Published on by BaliseLeave a comment
Loot from Essen SPIEL - multiple game boxes (Coral Reef, The Book of Dragons, Maui, Cascadia, Akropolis,All Roads, Maglev Metro, Project L, The Great Split, Flourish), a couple of jigsaw puzzles, a tshirt and a dark green meeple cushion.

It had been three years: last time we were in Essen was in October 2019. 2020 was a fully virtual edition; 2021 still felt too unsafe to go. This year, it felt OK enough, especially since there was a full mask mandate on the fair – we’ll see in the next few days if indeed it was! But in the meantime, it was SO GOOD to be back in Essen for SPIEL. We played a lot, we were ALMOST reasonable on our loot, we’re exhausted – but super happy to have gone 🙂

Now we’re back home… time for a few quick notes of all the games we saw! In order of play, because that’s approximately as arbitrary as I could make it anyway. I’ve been too lazy to add publishers/authors – but I’ve provided BGG links on the titles where available. Also, credit where credit’s due: many of these pictures are my husband’s 🙂 I kept these notes very short because it’s already a very long post; but I’m happy to give more details if you have specific questions!

Continue reading “Essen SPIEL 2022” →

52Frames – 2022-39 – Letters

Published on by BaliseLeave a comment
Facade of SwissLife, showing the letters "Swiss society of general human life insurance" in German, French and Italian, with all Swiss cantons flags below, carved in stone. In front of the wall, a small black car is passing quickly, and two people are looking at tram times at the tram stop. A large green and yellow tree is visible in the background of the image.

The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Letters”. I started grumbling because the weather was pretty bad early in the afternoon; it finally cleared up, so I went for a walk with my camera (and my husband 😉 ). My initial goal was to take pictures of Bahnhof Enge, but there’s repair/cleaning works ongoing, so that was not what I wanted for that picture. I took a few more pictures around – I have at least a backup for this image, and we made way to the lake. On the way, I remembered this facade – those are better letters!

I first grumbled because of the tram stop, but the picture I got feels a bit more alive/story-telling that way, so I like it. And when coming home, I realized the “extra credit” for this week was “Cinematic” – I processed a bit more in that direction, and claimed it 🙂

52Frames – 2022-36 to -38

Published on by BaliseLeave a comment

2022-36 – Golden Hour

A Casio watch on a white background, showing a long shadow on its right.

The theme for week 36 was “Golden Hour”, with an extra credit for “Indoor Studio Lighting”. Which was pretty good, because I shot this at a very late hour on Sunday evening 😉 I tried to reproduce the idea of golden hour with long, soft shadows and a yellower tint than I would typically use. This was a very lazy shot, but it did the job. Sad I don’t have a golden-colored watch – it would have been a better pun!

2022-37 – Portrait of a Stranger

A train attendant standing in front of the open door of an older train. The train beige, blue and golden; the letters BUDAPEST are visible on its side.

The “Portrait of a Stranger” theme is a common one on 52Frames, and probably the one where I’m the most likely to break my streak when it happens on a given year (we got a two-year reprieve in the previous years 😉 ), and I was fully prepared to “cheat” (I’ve done that before!). But, we went to the Hauptbahnhof on that Saturday, and that train just arrived on the track where we surfaced from the underground tunnels. Kismet it was – I took some pictures of the train, and decided to submit this one for that week.

52Frames – 2022-38 – One Light Source

A purple origami lotus flower on a white background, with a visible soft shadow on the side.

Another lightbox/studio shot for the “One Light Source” theme – but this time I took the time to refresh my paper background (compare with the first picture – it’s much better 😉 I did a bit of origami last week, and learnt that delightful lotus fold; I plopped it in my lightbox and played with a Lume cube until I was happy with the shadow, which I wanted soft, but visible.

52Frames – 2022-35 – Edited by Someone Else

Published on by BaliseLeave a comment
View over blue/turquoise lakes and green lush mountains with a few clouds and a very blue sky.

This week, 52Frames’ theme was “Edited by someone else” – we had a spreadsheet to sign up, and we could ask other Framers to edit our pictures. I was in Stoos at the beginning of this week, and I was lucky enough to have a few pretty days, during which I captured that image. I sent it to Caleb Levy, who edited the above picture.

I did do more pictures around that area – if you’re interested (with my edits, though, not Caleb’s 😉 ), they’re here: Stoos – August 2022.

52Frames Catch-Up

Published on by BaliseLeave a comment

Well, look at that, I forgot to post a bunch of 52Frames here! But, my streak is not broken 😉

2022-33 – Night Photography

Overexposed moon appearing behind a building. The moon seems to throw straight rays in all directions.

For “Night Photography”, we had had been having a full moon that week and, while I missed that one, I had noticed it was showing around the building in front of my balcony. So, later that week, I set up my tripod, and I waited for the moon to show. It eventually did – although later than what I was expecting – and, since I was already set up, I managed to snap a few pictures juuuuust before it showed behind that building, and then when it started illuminating the sky for real. I liked this one best of all the ones I took, because I like the “moonburst” effect – which I wouldn’t have had with a better exposed moon! (Which I also got, a few minutes later, when I was less concerned about the foreground context 🙂 – here it is!

Picture of an almost full moon in the middle of a dark sky.

2022-35 – Water

A black&white photography of a rainy night, as seen from the top of a building.

At the beginning of that week, we had some long-awaited rain. I took a few pictures, thinking “this will at least be a backup shot” and, look at that – it stayed a backup shot (and one I almost forgot to submit on top of that!).
I went for a “noir” B&W post-processing which I thought worked well with the car lighting the raindrops at the bottom.

2022-35 – Peace

Landscape picture. The foreground is green grass; then there's a mountain with a small cable car and sun rays filtering through trees; the background shows the side of a lake ans more mountains in the distance.

We were on holidays last week in Stoos, Switzerland – beautiful place, which also happens to be car-free: the cable car that’s visible on the image is one of the two ways to get up to the village (there’s also a fancy funicular on the other side of the village).
It’s a very serene place, and I thought it would work well for last week’s theme. And, due to holidays: shot and processed on my phone (I also had a camera, but no proper editing computer). There may or may not be more pictures incoming…. as soon as I finish processing them 😉

52Frames – 2022-31 – Choose a color

Published on by BaliseLeave a comment
A bunch of blue stuff on a blue blanket. From left to right and top to bottom: a bowl, a rum metallic cover "Appleton Estate Jamaica Rum", a piece of agate, a pencil case, a d20 showing number 13, a Labello stick, four Fate dice showing a minus, two plusses and a blank, a LEGO woman conductor minifig, a pencil sharpener, a LEGO Technic figurine, the back of a jigsaw piece, a Meeple, a Star Trek D20 showing a Star Trek logo, a 100CHF bill, a box of Kaweco blue ink, a Space Marine Funko Pop toy, a plastic box lid, and a stupid looking gopher Go mascot plush.

The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Choose a color”. There was an extra credit for “Use a generator”, but the generator gave me “agate grey”, which felt uninspiring (but I still got a piece of agate in here!).

I chose “Blue, first because I was considering using my blue desk mat as a background – but then it’s more aqua than blue, so I used my blanket instead. And I gathered a bunch of blue stuff around the house – including, obviously, one of the infamous blue bowls!

52Frames – 2022-30 – Single Focal Point

Published on by BaliseLeave a comment
A white flower over a green foliage background. The borders of the image have a heavy dark vignetting.

I wasn’t home for last week’s 52Frames, and I hadn’t taken my camera with me – which made the “Single Focal Point” theme a bit challenging (it’s typically the kind of theme where you do want focus and aperture control!). I still took a few pictures in the garden with my phone, and I edited this one to submit it in the last minute. I’ve honestly submitted worse images to 52Frames 😉

Scavenger Hunt #35 – Rainbow

Published on by BaliseLeave a comment
A large rainbow dot on a screen (the pixels are visible), sprinkled by small water droplets that magnify the pixel grid.

The 35th Scavenger Hunt had a very colorful theme, because there’s all colors of the rainbow in it, and then some. It took me a while to manage to find a way to get a set of pictures that would look like a proper set. My first idea was to try to do something around food photography; some of the colors dissuaded me. I finally landed on the idea of doing something I had wanted to do for a long time: playing with water and oil and soap to make BUBBLES. Not all the pictures have all these components, but I tried to keep a uniting “bubbles/droplets” theme while trying to provide some variation on the technique to get cohesive, but different images.

I had actually done a “rainbow-and-droplets” theme for a previous Hunt, which was sad, because now I needed a new idea. I had had some fun results with the pixels of my tablet on another picture recently, so I decided to lean into that for the Rainbow shot. I first created an image to display on said tablet:

A rainbow background sprinkled with various sizes and orientations of round rainbows

I didn’t know where I was going exactly, so I gave myself options with a rainbow background and more rainbows. Incidentally, this taught me how to create my own gradients with multiple colors, so that was useful 🙂 This gave me something to display on my tablet. Then I played with a few variations of liquids and water, and finally settled on a window cleaner sprinkler full of water to sprinkle my screen with small droplets. Finally, took pictures, decided for a shot, edited the shot, and that’s the last shot for this Hunt!

An underexposed image of a bright rainbow circle over a green/blue background, sprinkled with drops of water that magnify the pixels of the screen.
CameraPentax K-1 II
Lenssmc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length100 mm
F-NumberF/8
Exposure time1/125
ISO800

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

52Frames – 2022-28 – Silhouette

Published on by BaliseLeave a comment
A LEGO tractor silhouette against a red/yellow background reminiscent of a sunset

For this week’s 52Frames, the theme was Silhouette, with an extra credit for “Use Studio Lighting”. Since it was studio, it felt “right” to try to find something in my house to photograph and, lo and behold, I have LEGO!

I setup things on the balcony last night after sunset. The light is a couple of Lume cubes, one with a red filter and one with a yellow filter, reflecting light on the white wall of the balcony. The edit was a bit of a pain, because my balcony wall is not smooth and had a line in the middle – the edit is not perfect (I still see shadows of the line), but I’m still happy with it. I’m particularly happy with the light tones, I must say 🙂