Tag: 52frames

52Frames – 2021-50 – Black&White Minimalism

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The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Black&White minimalism”, with an extra credit for “Portrait”. When putting these two things together, I knew I wanted to go for something where only the face/elements of the face would be visible. My initial concept was to try to have something where the only visible elements would be a few face features, blurring the rest to white – but it felt kind of hard to pull off. (I might still play with that idea later, but that was not for today!).

Conversely, adding the hands to the portrait feels like it adds something to the composition, compared to not seeing them at all, while keeping with the “minimalist” theme.

Anyway, I took pictures of myself in front of a dark curtain, with a single right pointing at my face (I’ll admit that editing the picture was a bit tough as long as I still had remanent spots in my eyes ;)) and that’s the picture for this week.

52Frames – 2021-48 – Inspired By A Photographer – and 100 52Frames!

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Aaaaaand 100 in a row. It shows here: all time streak, 100. I almost gave up a few time this year, and I almost accidentally broke my streak (had an upload snafu earlier this year), but it got maintained by the kindness of the Powers That Be at 52Frames 🙂

I must say that, for a 100th week theme, I groaned a bit when I saw the theme. I’m not too fond of that kind of “inspired by”: it makes me feel like crap, because I feel that anyone I’d be “inspired by” may actually feel insulted that my meager attempt may try to emulate them. I did consider getting the inspiration from a fellow Scavenger (I had several people in mind 😉 ) and decided against that for that reason because I *know* these people. (Although, considering the average Scavenger, I’m pretty sure I would have found nothing but support there!).

Anyway, I looked at the problem from the other direction. I considered what I wanted to experiment with, looked for someone working in that direction, and tried to emulate their style as best as I could. And, trying to play with still life and light and that sort of things appeals to me greatly these days. I searched for that kind of thing, and stumbled upon the work of Sharon Core. In particular, I liked the light visibly coming from a diagonal in one of the upper corners; I tried to emulate that. To the best of my ability, I also tried to take more care than usual in my whole setup (subject, tripod, light, background) – it was also the first time I used the background-holding tripod I bought a couple of months ago! – and ended up with the picture above.

I’m actually happy with it, although I still have significant progress to do to light my subject: as it is, I didn’t get what I was going for, although I don’t hate the result. It also feels “right” to have celebrated my 100th week on this project by taking a bit more time to think about what I wanted to do and how to do it, instead of half-baking something at the last minute – as it has happened more often than not in the past few months.

Anyway, now that I have the 100… I can’t leave it like that, now, can I? Here’s to a hundred more!

52Frames – 2021-45 – Face a Fear

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Sepia picture of a mug of coffee, reading glasses, and a Kindle showing the cover of The Stand, by Stephen King

The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Face a Fear”. My major fear is fear of crowds, and, well, in these days and age, it’s actually a fear I’m not about to face recklessly 😉 So I went for a much tamer one for this picture!

I don’t deal well with scary books or scary or violent movies. I did, however, read The Stand twice – once around high school, and once more recently. I wouldn’t re-read it today: stories that have a background of plagues are not very enticing right now.

I also claimed the “New Photography Technique” credit. My new Fuji comes with neat filters and great JPEG processing, so I’m trying to see if I can make that work with, well, less processing on my end. I don’t think I ever will – I boosted the contrast and exposure of this one, and I re-cropped it too, but the color toning is all Fuji 🙂

52Frames – 2021-44 – Shot with a Phone

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A Fujifilm XT-30 mirrorless camera and a Pentax K-1 II DSRL, side by side on a blue mat.

You know what’s the worst timing? Getting a brand new camera, and having the same week “Shot with a Phone” as the weekly theme for 52Frames.

On the other hand, I get to show off my new camera, and the size difference with my lovely, lovely Pentax Monster. The new camera is the Fuji on the left; it’s an XT-30 II with a 18-135 lens attached to it. That whole setup is lighter than the Pentax body, and the lens of the Pentax is again as heavy, so…

I got the Fuji as a more compact, more transportable “travel camera”, and today was the first day I properly tested it. I’m happy to report that it is, so far, meeting my expectations: I like the interface (and the two control dials ❤️, and all the proper mechanical controls ❤️) except for a couple of minor things that feel more like a question of habit than anything else. It also has some neat features such as a panorama mode, that works pretty well (but seems to take a toll on the battery). I have a first set of pictures here: Fuji XT30 Test Walk in Zürich – 2021-10.

Oh, and regarding the picture for this week’s 52Frames – it was also an opportunity for me to test the new masking features of the latest version of Lightroom. ‘Cuz the initial picture was this:

And, honestly, it’s pretty good – may avoid a few roundtrips through Photoshop in the future, which I’m quite happy about.

52Frames – 2021-40 – Dreamscape

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The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Dreamscape”, with an extra credit for “Nightmare”. I was fairly uninspired, until I saw on the window Pierre’s DOOM plush toys, and went “mmmmh.”

The idea I went with was to try and get these two evil blobs in some kind of corridor, and I was thinking initially of slapping a green filter on it and be done, mostly. I fetched a box in the basement (we happened to have a box of a very good size for my purposes!), and opening the back felt like it was giving me the feeling of DOOM walls, so I kept it that way. I lit the image with a green lume cube, and used one of the other sides of the box as a barn door to get a shadow, again reminiscing of how I remember the lights in DOOM (not necessarily the color, but the angles). For the record, this was the SOOC picture:

I did a few fixes to make the box sliiightly less obvious; I also played with the “wave” filter in Photoshop, because that felt appropriate for the theme. And, while I’ve been grumbling a lot about the theme this week, I actually like that picture a lot – it makes me smile! 🙂

52Frames – 2021-39 – Daily Habit

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The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Daily Habit” with an extra credit for “First Person View”. I’m not very good at daily habits these days, but the one thing I manage to do consistently is taking my thyroid hormone supplement first thing in the morning, and more than half an hour before breakfast. And the best way I found to manage to do that is to put it on top of my phone when I plug it in for the night – so one of my daily habits is doing exactly that!

I kept the picture simple: this is literally how it looks in the evening on my desk, with the light coming from the light suspension in the office. I kept the exposure on the lower side because it’s late, and I emphasized that with a bit of vignetting.

52Frames – 2021-38 – Curves

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The theme for 52Frames this week was “Curves”. I coincidentally received a bunch of small ovoid polished stones this week (props for another project!); after playing with them for a little while I got the idea of organizing them along a sinusoidal curve.

I had first printed said curve ; I then realized I could use my tablet as a background to set them up and shut down the tablet, which would avoid a significant amount of postprocessing clean-up. Assembling the stones over the tablet ended up being fiddlier than expected (these things apparently CAN be detected as fingers when moving them around… annoying!), which means the setup is not perfect (and I was too lazy to fix in post) – but that’s one more week in the box 🙂