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!
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.
This week’s 52Frames had the theme “Color Relationship”, and an extra credit for “Harris Shutter Effect”. I had no idea what that was – so I looked into that 😉 The Harris Shutter Effect is obtained by multiple exposures taken through multiple color filters. In today’s world, it’s easier to achieve that in post-processing – I took multiple pictures, and combined three of them after having extracted the red, green and blue channels. (And then I processed the resulting shot.)
This was a super fun thing to experiment with – and it allowed me to play a bit with my external flash, which is not seeing a lot of action in general 😉 And I find the result pretty fun too! I kind of want to experiment more with it now 😉
Lists of words for the Scavenger Hunt usually contain a color. This time, the color was a bit particular: “Pantone Color of the Year 2021”. It turns out that said Pantone color had not been released yet and, although it rarely happens, this year, there were two: Ultimate Grey and Illuminating (which is a bright yellow).
My initial idea was to take a B&W picture with selective coloring of a yellow bath duck. It turns out that basic yellow bath ducks are surprisingly hard to find – I found a lot of “themed” ducks, but no… archetypical bath duck. (And I don’t own one either.) Since this didn’t happened, I was on the lookout for yellow and grey things on one of my photo walks. It turns out that the light on this parking building was a very nice golden yellow, and that the building itself was concrete grey. Neither shows much on my picture of said building:
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
Pentax D FA 24-70mm F2.8
Focal length
24mm
F-Number
f/9
Exposure time
1/80 s
ISO
160
But a bit of editing put it back to how I saw it initially. I’m not super-satisfied, neither with this picture by itself nor by its use for the theme (it is pretty weak), but I’d much rather have a weak submission than no submission at all, so there! (Also, looking at it a few weeks later, I’m wondering what crossed my mind for that crop. It’s weird and distracting. Bah!)
For “Upside Down”, I zeroed on the “upside down cake” interpretation fairly quickly – I just missed a recipe and an occasion, and both presented themselves during the time of the hunt. The usual “upside down cake” in France would be Tarte Tatin (upside down apple pie) but I wanted the concept to be recognizable by the larger Scavenger audience, so I went for a pineapple recipe, which looked like the most common meaning of the concept 🙂
I went for Nigella’s recipe: Pineapple Upside Down Cake, and it was (to my taste at least) absolutely fantastic cake 🙂 I messed up a bit on two occasions: a/ I used syrupy cherries instead of candied cherries (because candied cherries are actually surprisingly hard to get here – although since then I found them 😉 ) b/ I put too much of them in places they didn’t belong – which means they kind of bled through the pineapple. I also made the initial mistake of not centering the cake on the plate when I first removed it from the pan, and moving it to a more central position involved a lot of care.
Still, I made a lot of pictures, and that’s the one I ended up choosing. Some were better just after I got it from the pan because it was still steaming, but, well, see previous point about centering. It also took me a fair amount of trial and errors to get an angle I was happy with.
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
Sigma 28mm F1.8 EX DG Aspherical DG DF Macro
Focal length
28mm
F-Number
F/10
Exposure time
1/20 s
ISO
800
The edits were on the slightly more involved side of things because I wanted the background to be a clean black (and it wasn’t in the original picture, due to KITCHEN). I also went for a less purple aspect of the cherry bleeding, which felt better to me. I do regret a bit not seeing that I had lost significant light in the cherries on the border – could have been better on the edit there!
For all the interpretations of the word from my fellow Scavengers: the Upside Down album.
Clouds eluded me for a fairly long time – did I want to take pictures of proper clouds (very weather-dependent to get pretty ones, not something that can be relied to much in December in Zürich), make egg clouds, create clouds for a diorama with cotton? And then it struck me: we DO have a game where players control clouds, and I didn’t even have a board game-themed picture yet!
The game is called Petrichor; we mostly bought it because it had such a unique theme, but I must admit it’s still on the “pile of shame” of games we haven’t played yet. It’s a pity, though: I ran through the rulebook and played a solo game for this picture – I did mess up a rule (and my messing up of that rule is visible on this board 😉 ), but other than that the status on this board is a “real” game status 🙂 I took several pictures with different angles, and I settled on this one:
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
Pentax D FA 24-70mm F2.8
Focal length
38mm
F-Number
f/6.3
Exposure time
1/20s
ISO
800
It’s mostly dark because I underexposed because I was too lazy to get the tripod out; and the processing was limited to the usual crop/light/color adjustments.
For all the other interpretations of the word by my fellow Scavengers: the Cloud album.
The word Warming almost stumped me. Until, as I do every winter, I arrive after Christmas, and I go “urgh, I missed Glühwein AGAIN this year.” Glühwein (mulled wine) is a staple of Christmas markets and, while it still can be found in various places after Christmas and/or on ski resorts, it’s just not the same for me. This year, at least, there was the excuse of no Christmas market for me to miss it, and not just “getting distracted and forgetting about it”.
And at some point I made the connection between “warming” and “Glühwein” and my decision was there: I would make some Glühwein, drink it and be merry, and get pictures in the process. I started with the recipe of David Lebovitz – Vin chaud: Hot Mulled Wine – and tweaked it a bit. For one thing, I do want cinnamon in my mulled wine, so I added some. And for a second thing, well, the Swedish version does at least one thing right, and that’s the addition of raisins and almonds – so I did that as well. But I was quite happy to see that Lebovitz’ recipe had a star anise in there, because it makes for a visually interesting spot in the pan!
Anyway, I followed the recipe, and made pictures as it was cooking.
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
Pentax D FA 24-70mm F2.8
Focal length
58mm
F-Number
f/6.3
Exposure time
1/20 s
ISO
2500
The post-processing was, once again, very straightforward – crop, exposition, colors (I went for a slightly, well, warmer tone – that seemed adequate), and SHIP IT!
The word “Twenty-One” of the Scavenger Hunt list eluded for the longest time – it was the last picture I took. I went to Black Jack, to the year 21, to 21 as “the age you’re allowed to drink in the US”, I learnt that coincidentally the end of alcohol prohibition in the US was the 21st amendment – and most of that felt quite US-centric and not very satisfying. On top of that, what I had in mind with the Black Jack idea would probably have ended up very close to what I had done for Decisive Moment some years ago, and I didn’t particularly want to revisit that idea.
While still looking for ideas, I ended up on Wikipedia (as one does) – specifically 21 (number). It did remind me two things: a/ 21 is a triangular number – which I could actually use for composition purposes b/ there is 21 trump cards in a tarot deck (and OF COURSE I own at least a tarot deck).
From there on, I knew that I had something that would not yield a great picture, but that had some chance of being unique, and that spoke to me “culturally speaking” (because, well, math, and I did use to be an avid, although bad, tarot player 😉 ). I started arranging the cards, second-guessing arrangements, grumbling about things not staying at their place, and generally speaking trying to align things the best I could; and then I took some pictures.
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length
50mm
F-Number
f/5.6
Exposure time
1/20s
ISO
640
And then I got lazy, which meant I did way more work than I should have ;). The large reflection and the state of my floors were NOT okay to my taste; on the other hand, rearranging these cards in another place to fix that sounded like a pain.
Which means: Photoshop time! After a few basic adjustments in Lightroom, I opened Photoshop and a couple of tutorials about frequency separation in Photoshop (I’m very glad I had run into that term before and had some idea what I was looking for!) – in particular The Ultimate Guide to the Frequency Separation Technique – and went through a painstakingly long Photoshop session to get the floor/background of my image as I wanted it to be. And, to be honest, I’m actually very happy with the result.
This is not the best image I submitted to this Hunt, but I think it’s the one that taught me most things, so it has a special place in my heart 🙂 And now it may be time for me to play some Tarot too…
For all the other interpretations from my Scavenger fellows: the Twenty-One album.
The “Wheel” topic was not particularly inspiring to me. I thought about a color wheel (an idea I had played with for the Paper Abstract theme and I didn’t feel like trying again), a Ferris wheel (that’s not much of a thing right now), doing cartwheels (I have no idea who I could ask to model that – for sure I can’t self-portrait there)…
I passed by a bike shed on a walk, so I snagged a few shots. It was almost empty: it was the shed of the local mall, on a Sunday, at a time where nothing was supposed to be opened (and yet for some reason Starbucks was… no idea how.) I still felt somewhat self-conscious taking pictures of what I knew was a fairly uninspiring subject, and taking them in an uninspiring way too! But hey, I got a shot, so there’s that.
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
Pentax D FA 24-70mm F2.8
Focal length
24mm
F-Stop
f/7.1
Exposure time
1/25 s
ISO
320
The edit was straightforward: a bit of crop, exposure correction, I went for a warmer/yellower coloring because it felt better; I also removed the pedal on the right that felt distracting (after pondering if it could make sense to not have it there 🙂 ). And bam, an uninspiring, but very much in theme, picture for Wheel.
And for the images of my fellow Scavengers: the Wheel album.
The word “Count” of the 30th Scavenger Hunt list was, I think, the first one where I knew where I wanted to go – and obviously I went to Count Dracula. I usually pose for my portrait work, but for that one I definitely wanted a male model – and my husband gracefully accepted to pose for me 😉
This probably felt more like a theater endeavour than a photography one! We got him in a shirt (mandatory), I fought with cufflinks (cufflinks make no sense), we poured some cherry juice (“surprisingly not wine”) into a somewhat-chalice-looking beer glass (Kasteel, if you’re wondering), and I recycled the piece of fabric I use whenever I need a portable black background into a cape thanks to a safety pin. A bit of fiddling with the lights (I think this ended up being a white light top right and a Lume cube with a red filter bottom left), and voilà , we have a decent base for Dracula!
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
Pentax D FA 24-70mm F2.8
Focal length
36mm
F-Number
f/8
Exposure time
1/5 s
ISO
1250
Processing involved the standard light, color and crop adjustment, as well as adding pointy teeth – who would believe in a toothless Dracula? I also fixed the “cape” because my black fabric doesn’t have a proper hem and is quite fringey 😉 All in all, I’m very happy with the result – it was also the first time I tried to “direct a model” – “Show me more teeth!” 🙂
And, for the pictures of my Scavenger fellows: the Count album!
