For this week’s 52Frames, the theme was “Door”, with an extra credit for “Tell a story”. I liked playing with the mannikin last week, so I tried that again for this week (hint: this is not the last one you see there 😉 ). I shot in our TV room, placing the mannikin as if she were opening the door just enough to see what’s happening in the room. The major difficulty there was to pose the mannikin – but since she’s, by definition, pretty well articulated, it worked out! I also left her on her stand to take the picture – it’s hidden by her leg, but it kind of dictated the crop… which in retrospect I actually quite like!
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Wide Angle”. I don’t have much in terms of “proper” wide angle lens in my collection – lower I can go is probably an 18 from an old kit lens, but it crops on my full frame, which I feel defeats the purpose a bit.
Instead, we went on a long walk/short hike around Baar today (specifically, from Neuägeri to Baar); I didn’t feel like lugging my large camera (which was indeed a good call) so I took my Canon compact with me instead. That Canon coms with a 8.8-36.6 which would be equivalent to a 24-100 full frame – again, not very wide angle, but best I can get! (and technically wider than my phone’s 28-equivalent too 😉 )
Anyway, we ran into the Lorzentobelbrücke, and there was some good opportunities for pictures there – that’s the Borgenviadukt, which is the second of these bridges. I was particularly happy with the sunburst through the trees!
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!
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 😉
For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.
My fist idea was to take a picture of me in front and/or hiding behind board game boxes – and then I got a much funnier idea. Many board games have so-called “meeples” – the pieces that represent people. So I decided that transforming myself into a meeple could be pretty fun!
The original use of the word “meeple” comes from the game Carcassonne, which makes a significant use of them. In Carcassonne, players take turns adding square tiles to a common map and claiming various areas of the map; the final score is computed by considering the size and state of the areas controlled by each player.
It was consequently natural to set things up into a Carcassonne game. That said, my own copy of Carcassonne comes with transparent meeples, which would make the image all the more challenging, so I stole a meeple from another game. And I picked a red one, OBVIOUSLY, because I always play red.
My final image is a composite of a board game picture:
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length
100 mm
F-Number
F/9
Exposure time
1/13 s
ISO
640
and a self-portrait picture:
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length
100 mm
F-Number
F/10
Exposure time
1/10 s
ISO
320
Editing ended up being…. more straightforward than expected. I was afraid I’d have to fight way more than I did with the composition which, granted, took a bit of time, but ended up working out much better than I was expecting. I’m very happy that I thought of wearing a red t-shirt: it made the merging with the red meeple that much easier 🙂
For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.
Farm themes are pretty common in board games, to the point that I have wooden sheep in a significant amount of them. I also have different models of sheep! The sheep in this picture come from two sources: Caverna (the darker/yellower ones) and Glen More II. Caverna is a worker placement game in which the player controls dwarves that try to earn the most gold by building facilities in their caves and going on adventures. Glen More II is a territory building game where the player controls a clan of Scots trying to gain resources, influence and whisky.
For the picture, I gathered all my sheep in a bowl that I had covered with fluffy material – my latest attempt at knitting, which “will be a scarf this winter” for probably 5 years now – but hey, photo prop! I own more wooden sheep than that, but the models for the other games was close enough from the Caverna style that I didn’t feel like sorting them out again afterwards.
This is the initial picture, for which the edits were straightforward.
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length
100 mm
F-Number
F/8
Exposure time
1/40s
ISO
1250
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Fluffy album.
For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.
Teal is a common enough player color in board games that I had quite a lot of choice for my Teal picture. I chose the game Crusaders because it seemed like the best option if I wanted to have a sea of teal and not just a few pieces on the board.
In Crusaders, players fight for influence over Europe by traveling, mustering troops, building buildings, and the like. The different actions make the following actions easier or more powerful – which makes Crusaders fairly strong in the “engine building” category. It’s a bit intimidating to explain, but the game flows really well and it’s really enjoyable.
Here’s the initial picture, close enough from the end result that the edits were very straightforward:
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length
100 mm
F-Number
F/10
Exposure time
1/25s
ISO
800
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Teal album.
For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.
For the word “Tiny Creatures”, making a picture around Bunny Kingdom was completely obvious very early. The irony is that, at the scale of the game, these bunnies are actually HUGE – they take over whole fields and castles! But the first time we saw this game, we (okay, probably I) were enchanted by “LOOK AT ALL THE TINY RABBITS AAAWWW”.
Bunny Kingdom is a draft and control territory game. Players draft through a deck of cards that allow them to put a bunny territories, to upgrade these territories (with resources and castles), and to get various bonuses. And it has a lot of bunnies.
For this picture, I chose to not display a remotely valid game state: I felt that the addition of the bonus tiles would crowd the picture… and I wanted the picture to be crowded by bunnies, not by other game pieces. I also usually run through a reasonable-ish simulation of the game to get to a believable-ish state of the game for my pictures. For this one, I setup the castles first, then I put bunnies from each player in the castles, and I completed within what I would consider being reasonable moves within these parameters (but then, I suck at this game, so what do I know).
This yielded the following initial image, which was straightforward enough to edit.
For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.
One of the words was “Window” and, while it may seem hard to have a board game themed image for that, there are two games that I know of that use the theme “let’s build stained window panels”: Sagrada, and this one, Azul Stained Glass of Sintra. Since I own the second one and not the first one, that’s the one I went for 🙂 Azul Stained Glass of Sintra is the second game of the Azul series (there’s currently, I think, three of them). They are abstract games that have the same core mechanics: tiles are randomly put into groups in the middle of the table. Players take turns taking all the tiles of the same color in a group and placing them on their board. Full lines give points; extra tiles count for the line count negative points. It’s a game we enjoy a lot… probably because it’s exactly our level of “cutthroat” 😉
I ran through a quick simulation between two players before taking a picture around what would be roughly early-mid-game, and this was the original picture, which didn’t require much edit work:
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length
50 mm
F-Number
F/8
Exposure time
1/30s
ISO
800
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Window album.
For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.
Tea was… not easy. There exists a few board games that have tea as a theme, but I don’t own any of these. There’s a Tea card in Sushi Go, but that felt like a bit of a stretch. I finally decided that it was “my theme, my rules” 😉 When it comes to tea and games, my strongest association is role-playing games; the teapot that’s used in this shot is actually a gift from one of my game masters who really wanted a proper device to make tea (and that teapot is called Le Device 🙂 ).
I went for a bit of creative license, though, because the game I represent here is Dungeons & Dragons (the character sheet is 5th ed, the rest is 4th ed :P), and we didn’t drink much tea during D&D 🙂 D&D (and many role-playing games) is a narrative game where the players get to interact with a story, set in a high fantasy setting, under the guidance of a game master who knows and controls the setting and the obstacles of the story.
There’s been a lot of takes for this image, because I wanted the setup and angles to be just right; and I recruited my husband to give the impression that there were other players around the table too 😉 For this shot I used my Platypod, which may be one of the first times it gets used “for real”, and it helped a lot getting low enough on the table for the shot I wanted.
That’s the original shot – edits were pretty light on this one.
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
Pentax D FA 24-70mm F2.8
Focal length
36 mm
F-Number
F/10
Exposure time
1/60s
ISO
1250
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Tea album.
