The theme for this week’s 52Frames is a (as far as I remember) yearly favorite (I’ve done it at least once in the past 🙂 ) – “Line from a Song”. There’s technically a generator (and the associated “extra credit” if you take the first sentence from the generator), but this time around I was listening to Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love, and I thought I could do something neat with that. I pretty much had the image in my mind already; I’m not sure it completely matches what I envisioned, but I think it’s actually pretty close.
This picture is a composite of four photographies – the three of the manikins dancing, and the banner (which I made with paper and a marker 😉 ). It took me a while to get “good enough” image cutting (I just ordered a green screen. This should help future endeavors. Hopefully.), and then I played with opacities and whatnot to finally get the image above.
The theme for 52Frames this week was A Line from a Song. They put together a generator to provide some ideas – and there was an additional constraint for the extra credit of “using the very first quote the generator provides you”.
Aaaaand the very first quote that the generator provided me was “All in all it’s just another brick in the wall” – Pink Floyd, obviously. I’ll take that as a sign of destiny – I instantly knew what I wanted to do with that one, and I looked into more quotes from that generator, and they seemed far more difficult to me 😉
So today I gathered my LEGO bricks, my lights and my camera, and I made an image to submit for the challenge 🙂 My first idea was to have a colored brick in the middle of a white wall – turns out, I… don’t think I have any colored 2×1 brick in the house. (Maybe in the TARDIS?). So I looked into what I had, and I had transparent bricks. Except that I remembered transparent bricks having the same structure as the non-transparent ones, with a tube for the stud assembly (like that), and mine… did not (like that). That made me think that it wouldn’t be necessarily visible that there WAS a brick there – which kind of defeated the purpose.
But I also had in my collection a pile of three transparent plates – which would actually give me both the transparency and the texture I was looking for. I assembled a wall with a few brick, put my transparent plates in lieu of a regular brick, and tadaa! The shot was surprisingly hard to get right – for my first attempts, I was only lighting the wall from behind, without supporting the light on the wall itself, which made exposure a profound pain to handle correctly. Plus, my LEGO bricks were all dusty, and it REALLY SHOWED on macro shots.
I finally got a shot I could work with – took a fair amount of editing still before I got the shot I had in mind. For the record, that’s the initial shot I was working with:
I’m quite happy with how this turned out. It initially felt like a low-effort kind of project, and I was half-expecting to send this with a “eeeh, not the most creative thing ever but I submitted”, but it took more time than I thought, it felt good building the image, and that’s actually the most fun I’ve had in photography for a few weeks 🙂
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