Tag: 52frames

52 Frames – 2019 Week 02 – Rule of Thirds

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The theme for the second week of the 52Frames project was “Rule of Thirds“. I’ll admit my motivation for this theme was not very high – I considered going the “cheeky” route and take a picture of a third of a pie, but eh. And since it’s the second week, NOT submitting is inconceivable 😉

I knew motivation was going to be low, so when I went for lunch on Thursday and ran into that very pretty snowy tree, I took a bit of time to frame it within the constraints of said rule of thirds with my phone camera, thinking I’d have a backup shot in all cases.

I spent a bit of time doing some post-processing – cleaning up a few spots, removing a piece of road that was a bit ugly, and generally speaking bending the reality a little bit to get a better picture. Re-considering it right now, I’m thinking that maybe I should have removed more snow in the middle and compressed a bit the distances more – so that I would have better “horizontal” thirds.

I can’t say I’m particularly proud of that one – I do find it quite boring; but it’s submitted, it’s within the constraints of the challenge, and that’s all that matters!

52Frames – 2019 Week 01 – Self-portrait

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The first assignment of the year for the 52Frames project was, as it is traditional, “Self-Portrait“. I got a crystal ball for Christmas that I needed to take for a first spin, so that’s what I did.

I did want to have a fairly neutral background – which is pretty hard when you do have a crystal ball that gives you a huge field of view – so I ended up taking pictures on the floor, below my camera set on my beloved tripod that can rotate the central column 90°. Even there, I’m a bit annoyed at the reflection from the window – but oh well. (I tried to post-process them away and failed miserably :P)

I played quite a bit with different ways of getting a proper focus – increasing the f-stop to get more “probability of being in focus”, trying to let the camera do its thing with autofocus and pray for the best, setting the camera at “this seems like a pretty good distance” manually and moving the ball up and down, taking multiple pictures as I went… In the end, the one I eventually chose was one of the earlier in the set. I like the hand position, and I also like the curl of hair that happened to go behind it.

The conclusion of that whole setup was that focusing on a crystal ball is not necessarily trivial, and it’s so much worse when trying to do it blindly while controlling the shutter with a remote 😉

Also worth mentioning: my t-shirt is the t-shirt for Slingshot by Tobias Klausmann, and if you haven’t read it yet you should 😉

New year, new 52frames

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A while ago, I participated somewhat regularly to the 52frames challenge. 52 weeks, 52 themes, 52 pictures. I kind of liked it, the themes are typically “challenging, but open enough”, and I quite like the “extra credit” that allows to either add another constraint or not. But eventually I ended up missing a week, two weeks, … many weeks, and it disappeared from the “things I do”.

New year times are obviously a “common” time to re-start that kind of challenges, and since I’m the least original person in the world, well, I’m restarting a run this week – I checked earlier that I still had an active ID, and I intend to submit a picture for this week’s challenge, Self-Portrait.

And since I decided I’d put more content on my blog, I’ll also post what I do here whenever the album is published (typically on Wednesdays, if I remember correctly) – in a way, I’m adding some additional accountability 😉

So – see you next week – in the meantime, I need to shoot a self-portrait 🙂 (Well, another one. The one on top of this post is a few months old already.)