The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Extreme Close-Up”, explicitly not limited to macro. I went for the easy shot of opening a drawer, opening my color pencils case, and taking a picture of that; uninspired, yes, one more week, also yes. (Hoping to get more motivation for photography eventually some time soon!)
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 😉
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 🙂
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.
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Reflections” – as usual, it starts by “I’ll just take pictures of a couple of dice on a tablet”, and it ends with a full setup in the softbox with a couple of lights and a tripod.
Still, this does feel like a fairly low-effort / low-motivation / low-creativity shot – but, eh, it’s a shot.
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Rule of Thirds”. I admit this is not my favorite kind of theme, because it’s not restrictive enough, and it’s not really making my brain thrive with creativity. That said, the extra challenge (which I claimed) was for “1/2000s or faster” – for which flash-less drop photography works reasonably well. I setup three bright LED panels on top of a plate containing water colored in blue, I grabbed a remote and a small drip pipette, and started shooting. I had a few issues at the beginning getting the focus right – but I eventually prevailed by focusing manually on the place where the drop would fall, instead of “the line where I think it would and focusing on the border of the plate” (that didn’t work at all). That, in term, allowed me to open my aperture more, and to finally get enough light without having a super-grainy picture, in order to be actually able to claim the extra challenge.
I’ll have to try that sort of things with flashlights eventually 😉
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Unexplored”. It turns out that there’s a place in Zürich I always kind of wanted to visit but never dared to, because it felt awkward: the local cemetery in Sihlfeld. So I gathered a bit of courage along with my camera, and went there.
Well, it turns out that it’s a beautiful place, very quiet, with a lot of trees; and it… actually didn’t felt too awkward to take pictures there – even less so than in a regular park due to the distinct lack of crowds. I thoroughly enjoyed my stroll there; I was, however, somewhat nonplussed with the pictures I managed to take – which I feel don’t necessarily reflect well the mood of the place. But, now that the initial exploration is out of the way, I’ll probably go back with a better plan in mind 🙂
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Depth of Field”, with an extra credit (which I claimed) for “f1.4”. I have exactly one lens able to go up to 1.4, and that’s not its best aperture to say the least 😉 (the chromatic aberration is strong there.) But I was still adamant on claiming this extra credit, because I don’t shoot that wide open enough, and I thought it would make a nice training for me 🙂
I had seen on Instagram cloudsnug mentioning he was seeing the first crocuses in his garden – which made me take my camera on a trip to the Arboretum / Rentenwiese, where I had been delighted by early flowers last year. And indeed, there was snowdrops and purple crocuses, so I spent a bit of time trying to catch a reasonable low depth of field picture of them. It was also a good exercise in manual focus training! I will admit that I would have preferred working with either my 50mm macro (instead of my 50mm non-macro) or with my 100mm macro – but I still very much enjoyed the time I spent at the park.
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