The theme for last week’s 52Frames was “Nature”. The weather was good and I could have gone for a more “exotic” piece of nature, but I still have a week of walking with crutches, so… not! Thankfully, a plant of thyme decided to start growing between the slabs of my 5th floor balcony. And it currently has little flowers. So, there – you get a picture of my random balcony thyme plant 🙂
The theme for this week’s 52Frame was “Emotion. My first idea was to get a selfie of myself being visibly annoyed at the plastic walking boot that’s enclosing my ankle for another two weeks while my fracture heals, but I decided to get my manikins to use instead. I took a picture in front of my green screen, and composited them on an older background (taken a few years ago on top of the Uetliberg). This is neither a good composite nor a good picture, but eh, it’ll do the job for this week 🙂
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Long shutter”, with an extra credit (which I claimed) for “Light Painting”. I must admit I didn’t give too much thought on the topic of my light painting – it needed to be recognizable and basic enough for my somewhat drawing-challenged self to be able to pull it off in not too much time and takes. A heart looked easy enough when paying a bit of attention, and indeed it worked out okay.
This is a composite of three images: one where I was drawing a heart with a red-filtered Lume cube and a green one in each hand; one where I inverted both cubes, and one where I didn’t have a filter – which I blended negatively in postprocessing (so that I got the cyan, blue and magenta showing there.)
It actually looks fairly decent for the low amount of effort I put in this picture 😉
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 final composition, “Present”, was something I had in mind all along during this Hunt – I wanted to have, as a final image, “a Scavenger view of Zürich”. I added a blue and white background to represent the colors of the city, and I added my pictures on top of it. I started working with Photoshop, and it was kind of hell, when suddenly I realized I wasn’t doing image processing, I was doing… layout. So I grabbed Publisher, and I was done in less time than I can count 😉 Obviously, there was a couple of “awkward” shots to place – the “Crack” one proved particularly annoying… until I realized it was abstract enough to be able to place it essentially anywhere. I setup the “bridge” image as a centerpiece of the composition, because that’s the most recognizable view of the city. While I didn’t keep with the usual aspect ratio of a postcard, this was mostly the aesthetics I wanted to reach – and I think I mostly managed.
All in all, during all of this Hunt, I wanted to show “my” city, which recently become much more than the city I live in – it’s also the city that accepted me as Swiss citizen at the end of last year, and it’s my “Heimatort” (place of origin) – I’m now, very officially, “from” Zürich, and this was something I wanted to celebrate 🙂
I also thought it’d be neat to have a map of the places where I took pictures: here’s the interactive map link, and here’s a screenshot of it for… posterity:
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Present album.
I knew I was going away for the week, so I did consider doing my 52Frames on Monday… and then saw that the theme was quite compatible with being on holidays. We went on top of the Cimetta during said holidays, and were lucky enough to see some paragliding happening fairly close to us! As soon as I saw that, I knew I had my 52Frames shot locked – and indeed I did – this one is one of many shots I took around that time 🙂
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”.
My picture for “Music” is a mix of “found shots” and “I know where I’m getting that shot”. The Musik Hug shop was very much in my mind when I took my camera on a walk to get some shots; it also has a room with many Steinway pianos that I was hoping to capture. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a polarizing filter on that lens yet at that time, making my initial plan fail.
But I still turned around the building, and their collection of displayed vinyls caught my eye, mostly because it has one of my favorite albums on display! (Yes, that’s be the Queen one 😉 ). And when I realized that the St.-Peter church (and Europe’s largest church clock face!) was visible in the reflection… well, if you can’t beat’em join’em – it actually made me happy to get a better picture for my overarching “Zürich” theme than I would have gotten if I had gone with my first idea – it’s actually one of my favorite pictures for this round :). Here’s the initial 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/3.6 |
| Exposure time | 1/60s |
| ISO | 2000 |
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Music album.
What happens in… the other school?
This is the book 7 of the Wayward Children series, and I still love that universe to infinity and beyond. Besides Miss Eleonor’s Home for Wayward Children, there exists another school for the kids who crossed a door, came back, and are trying to re-adjust to Earth life. Contrarily to the Home, the Whitethorn Institute is trying to re-adjust kids by trying to make them forget their adventures, and making them believe they never happened. And Cora, who we met in the previous books, just transferred there – because she believes life will be more bearable there. But then, obviously, it’s complicated. And the headmaster is kind of shady. A good addition to the series, although I kind of regretted not spending more time in beyond-the-doors universes.
What if living forever came with the curse of being forgotten by everyone?
At the beginning of the 18th century, Addie makes a deal for her freedom from a marriage she doesn’t want. The terms of the deal und up being an… interesting curse – she gets to live for as long a time as she can bear… and in exchange, she gets forgotten by anyone as soon as they leave the room. We follow Addie’s life until the 21st century, a time where she finally meets someone who recognizes her. The novel is written in the perspective of all the events and lives that Addie has lived, in different times, and crossing the paths of many people, and some people many times. I really enjoyed the journey of this book and the reflection it triggered for me about life, time, creativity, relationships and personal impact on the world.
What can POSSIBLY go wrong when you’re a bounty hunter hired by your sworn enemy?
Yay, a new series by Jessie Mihalik! (I still need to read Rogue Queen, but Consortium Rebellion was very cool 🙂 ). The narrator of the series, Octavia “Tavi” Zarola, is a bounty hunter and captain of a small crew, who was her team when she was fighting in the war. Torran Fletcher was a general on The Other Side Of The War That Just Ended – with the telepathic race of that corner of the universe. He’s also very good looking, apparently, and he has enough credits to hire Tavi’s crew and ship for a mission behind ex-enemy lines to recover unknown precious cargo. All in all, a pretty cool story, a nice slow-burn romance, and interesting considerations around telepathy and consent.
This book also made me realize that I really, really enjoyed what I’d call “descriptions of domesticity in a group of adults living together” – this is also a strong background for many of Becky Chambers’ books, and possibly why I appreciate some post-apocalyptic settings where the protagonists kind of have to stick together to survive.
Twenty years after Rachel’s Holidays, Rachel has it mostly figured out, until…
Marian Keyes is one of my “auto-buy” authors. I like her blend of light and tough topics, and the fact that I can chuckle one page and wipe a tear on the next chapter. The Walsh family is pretty familiar by now (it’s the 7th book in that setting), and we’re going back to Rachel’s story. Twenty years ago, Rachel was entering rehab, “not because she has a problem, see, but…”. At the start of this book, she’s clean, in love, working as a counselor in her ex-rehab center and gardening on her free time. Until one day she gets a phone call that pulls her down memory lane.
It was a tough book at times – there are stories about addiction, and about what can drive people to that, and without spoiling things too much, you may want to have a look at content warnings if some themes are hard for you. But as it was, it was exactly what I expected from Keyes, and I immensely enjoyed reconnecting with Rachel.
A kinky romance between a Black millionaire and a trans woman; it’s actually sweeter than it is kinky, and it’s significantly kinky. Not going to say much about this one, because I’m self-conscious, but I really enjoyed it (both characters are fantastic), so it felt wrong to not even mention it 🙂
More Bobs, more adventures, oh my!
In the first book of the Bobiverse, we met Bob, who by a series of accidents ends up becoming the brain of a Von Neumann probe fighting against a theocracy and exploring the galaxy where no one has gone before (well, unless the apparent gazillion of other extraterrestrial lives that seem to exist in the galaxy). In For We Are Many, we follow the continued adventures of all the Bobs who, in the meantime, have solved multiple problems such as FTL communication (useful) but sometimes struggle with their different self-imposed missions. This stays a very enjoyable story, with a special mention to the audiobook narrator, Ray Porter, who gives a pretty recognizable tone and cadence to all the Bobs and all the other characters – very impressive. I am, however, not convinced by his rendition of women voices – of which there are, however, not that many (not that it’s a good thing in general, but in that case… mixed blessing, I guess 🙂 ). It made me laugh out loud more than a few times, and I’m looking forward to the third book.
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Low key”, with an additional (claimed) challenge for “Bodyscape”. I don’t have much courage nor interest to take pictures of body parts other than hands, but I got the idea of making a hilly landscape out of my knuckles. I lit it from behind with lume cube and a yellow/orange filter to yield an impression of sunrise/sunset (I titled that picture “Sunrise on Knuckles Hills” for 52Frames 🙂 ) and shipped it with fairly minimal processing.
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 expected to be in a bit of trouble with “Lemon” – should I bring a random lemon to a location? Or try to find a restaurant with “Lemon” in its name and go from there? (I knew at least some places with “Lemongrass” in the name.) So I actually searched on Google Maps for, well, “lemon”. And there’s a shop called “Blue Lemon” on one of the iconic squares of Zürich, Paradeplatz. I felt a bit self-conscious taking pictures in that place – lots of people, and feeling a bit weird about taking pictures of that shop! I finally landed on the following picture. Since I wanted the theme to be obvious and not hidden somewhere in the image, I went for the selective coloring of the lemon in post. And since I like Easter eggs, I also re-saturated te blue to get the faint blue at the bottom of the tram too 😉
| Camera | Fujifilm X-30 II |
| Lens | Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR |
| Focal length | 18mm |
| F-Number | F/13 |
| Exposure time | 1/40s |
| ISO | 2000 |
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Lemon 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 think “Juxtaposition” was not a shot that I had planned before I left the apartment, but it came to me when I arrived in the vicinity of the Landesmuseum – I remembered that there was some controversy about the extension of the museum, at least partly because it was supposed to be a building contrasting greatly with the older, end-of-19th century building. Remembering that, I wondered if there was a way to maybe show both in the picture – and it turns out that, probably by design, there was! I took a short walk around the place and took a number of pictures; this one ended up being my favorite. I also like the presence of the tree – which would be better if I had taken that picture in the summer and not in the dread of winter, probably! – to add a second element of juxtaposition.
| 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/10 |
| Exposure time | 1/60s |
| ISO | 1250 |
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Juxtaposition album.
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