Tag: 52frames

52Frames – 2021-21 – Portrait

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A lot of photographers are far more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it. I don’t have too much problems being in front of MY camera (where I control what gets out of my hard drive 😉 ); trying to take pictures of someone else is a whole other ball game and much further away from my comfort zone.

But for the 52Frames of this week, the theme was “Portrait”, with an extra credit for “Rembrandt Lighting“. And I kind of knew that I needed to be behind the camera and not in front of it, so I asked Pierre to help me, and he gracefully accepted to pose. He was also instrumental in helping me setting up the lights – my first setup did not work as I wanted it to work, and it took some insights and suggestions from him before I actually got there! I lack experience in lighting, and this is far from natural from me… something to practice!

52Frames – 2021-20 – Red

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Am I posting two self portraits within two days? You bet I am.

For 52Frames, the theme this week was “Red”, with an extra credit for “red flash gel” (which I claimed). For once, I knew exactly what I wanted to do for this theme… and then arrived on Sunday evening at 2230, swore a lot… and got the tripod out of the shelf.

I’ve been wanting to play with colored portrait lights for a while; consider this a small incursion in the domain. I lit myself with a couple of Lume cube, one with a red filter and one with no filter; took a couple of dozens of shots with different angles and a bit of variation on the light.

I still have no idea what I’m doing there, and this one was definitely a “lucky” shot, which I like quite a lot – but… more experiments required 😉

52Frames – 2021-19 – ISO100

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The theme for 52Frames this week was “ISO100”, with an extra credit for “fully manual”, which I claimed. “ISO100” is typically the kind of theme that doesn’t give me enough constraints to breed creativity; add to it that my motivation this week was pretty low, and this yields a fully uninspired shot, mostly taken to Not Break The Streak.

So here, you get a shot of the clouds over the Uetliberg.

And, consequently, I did not break the streak, and I’ll try to have a better shot next week 😉

52Frames – 2021-18 – Fabric

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The theme for 52Frames this week was “Fabric”. I somehow knew exactly what I wanted to do for this topic – I was not expecting that this picture would be so challenging to work with – this was literally headachy! (Don’t stare at it for too long 😛 )

I’ve been wanting to experiment with backgrounds that I could re-use in other pictures and/or play with for different purposes – the “Fabric” topic seemed like a nice fit for that. I took a picture of a striped t-shirt and swirled it in postprocessing; it worked… better than expected, I must say (despite the headache 😛 ). I’m keeping this in mind for future psychedelic backgrounds!

52Frames – 2021-16 – Edited by someone else

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The “Edited by someone else” is a staple of 52Frames every year: you take a picture, and you leave the creative wheel to someone else for the edits. The “someone else” can be someone you know, or there’s a handy spreadsheet where people put their name and how much they’re willing to edit, and all in all it works very well (I edited for one person, and I asked someone to edit for me).

My picture was edited by Dirk Bergstrom – and I’m happy with what he did with it 😉 I had provided three pictures of the same chocolate cake, thinking he could go with the one he preferred. He was nice enough to provide me with two edits of two different pictures – here’s the other one:

I like it too, but I thought the first one was more intriguing.

And, for the record, with the same base as the first one, this is my own edit:

The whole “Edited by someone else” theme requires a bit more logistic and is somewhat more stressful than the usual 52Frames themes – but I always find the exercise very interesting 🙂

52Frames – 2021-15 – Trapped

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The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Trapped”. I would expect a lot of conceptually darker images in this album; I decided I didn’t want to do that because my mood really didn’t need that kind of thing right now.

So I played around with the idea of board games – there’s a lot of situations where, as a player, you feel trapped either by previous bad decisions or by bad luck. I was first considering abstract games like go or chess – except I don’t play any of these (and I don’t own boards for them!) Connect4 or Tic-Tac-Toe would have been an option too. A couple of other ideas came to my mind – a player getting its road cut at Ticket to Ride, or a territory getting disconnected at Terra Mystica – but that felt too “niche” to convey the concept to a greater audience.

I settled for Monopoly – and that sinking feeling of “well, I just rolled the pair of dice that sent me to jail”. I don’t particularly enjoy Monopoly, but as concept illustration, it can actually go a long way!

52Frames – 2021-14 – Fast shutter speed

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After the “slow shutter speed” of previous week, there was a “fast shutter speed” for last week! (Yeah, I’m a bit late posting.) The secondary theme was “drip water photography”, so that’s what I did. I must admit I put in far less effort than in last year’s picture with that theme – I did want to try things out with a black background, but I didn’t have much time or motivation to do it well. In particular, I’ve been quite lazy with lights – and using the flash may have been counter productive there because the flash sync speed is pretty slow!

But, anyway – I got the picture; I’ll need to play with that again at some point – but better. Probably next year when that theme comes around again 😉

52Frames – 2021-13 – Fast shutter speed

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Another 52Frames where the extra credit, “Rear Curtain Sync”, made me experiment with my flash 🙂 The theme was “Slow shutter speed”, and the idea of the “rear curtain sync” is to have the flash sync just before the shutter stops. Hence, you can see the movement of the object, and the end of the movement “frozen” by the flash.

It took me a while to find something that would work – I experimented with playing cards and (not exactly seriously, but for Scienceâ„¢ purposes) with me dancing in front of the camera until I got the idea of a pendulum (“that would work okay”) and got the idea of using some of my sparkly pendants (which I had bought from Kit Rocha’s Market Square) to get the image. And, after a few tries (and moving in front of a dark background instead of a white one), I got the image I submitted (above).

I also processed a couple of outtakes:

I liked the streaks on that first one better, but the pendant itself felt more distracting, especially with the reflection of the flash. The second one I’m… almost regretting not choosing for my entry – I only processed it this morning, and after processing I think it may be better. However, the pendant in the middle is really not sharp enough to my taste (I think it’s a focus issue more than a movement issue, which sucks).

Still, it was nice experimenting – and I’m particularly proud of these because it was almost a break of my (now) 65-week streak (and now that I have passed 64, I have no choice but to continue to 128, right?)

52Frames – 2021-12 – Window light

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The theme for 52Frames this week was “Window Light”, with an extra credit for “Use a mirror”. I went to the kitchen trying to have a look at where I could setup a small mirror to try to get something that’s unmistakably inside, but that would reflect the world outside the window. And I ran into… my Kenwood, which happens to have a very nicely reflective metallic bowl.

And it’s doubly great: because of the curved surface, there’s actually A Lot of angle in that picture, and the majority of my windows in that room are actually visible!

52Frames catchup

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I’ve had a few weeks where I took and submitted my 52Frames picture, but I didn’t make a blog post here – so I’m going to do that now to catch up 🙂

2021-07 – Golden Hour

I snagged this one with my phone during a short walk that happened, well, close enough to Golden Hour to make it work for the theme – I liked the light on top of the Uetliberg 🙂

2021-08 – Roll Credits

I wasn’t particularly inspired by the “Roll Credits” prompt; my husband made some almond cakes that week, and I took a few shots as we were eating them (with my phone as well); and I processed it with a strong vignette to give the idea of a gradual radial fade to black.

2021-09 – Details

Looking for details, my eyes fell on the bookmarks of my journal, and I thought it would be a nice detail – I still have a fair amount of white pages in this one!

2021-10 – Negative Space

When it comes to negative space, having something with an interesting shape feels key for me; I zeroed in on the idea of the bread knife pretty quickly. I used a strong light to reflect on the blade to get a sharp (pun intended, of course) contrast – it took a few attempts, and significant processing to get the background black – it was more reflective than I expected… but I ended up being happy with the result.