Tag: Photography

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	Pentax D FA 24-70mm F2.8
Focal length	24mm
F-Number	F/9.0
Exposure time	1/20 s
ISO	800

Path is probably one of the pictures I like less for this Hunt. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s a bad picture, but it’s somewhat uninspired and bland. This is a path near the river not far for my place, and it’s actually fairly rare to manage to catch it that empty: there’s usually a large amount of pedestrians and bikes trying to share it with or without grumbling 🙂

That’s mostly the reason why the framing is slightly “offset” compared to what I’d try to usually do (I think) – I didn’t want to be in the way, so I settled on the side on the path and started shooting. I took a fair amount of pictures, trying different combinations of depth of field and focus; I ended up liking the ones with the smallest aperture best, because the tree in the foreground was sharper and it felt better to not focus explicitly on said tree, so, there.

With the SOOC constraint, my major difficulty was to manage both framing and a picture that’s not crooked; I had pictures that I liked better in my set but that would have required some editing, so they were out by definition.

If not for the SOOC constraint, I might have gone for this:

This one is actually a composite. The person is in another picture – for which the whole picture was softer and the framinig was meh-er, but I really liked the idea of having someone there; and I also liked that the person was looking at the water (that I know to be behind the trees 🙂 ) and not simply walking. It was a no-no as it was, but comp’d with the one I submitted, it would have made it better 🙂

(Hi, my name is Balise and I’m compositing pictures for “what ifs” in a SOOC challenge 😀 )

And for the album of my fellow Scavenger fellows, follow the Path 🙂

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mmF2.8 W
Focal length	100mm
F-Number	F/16
Exposure time	1/2 s
ISO	400

With the list of words that we had for this round, the idea of a broken egg took place in my mind and never moved away from it. So I broke an egg on a reasonable surface, and I started shooting. I had started shooting hand-held, but after a few shots it became obvious that I wanted more depth of field than I could shoot handheld (and not compensate for in post), so I sighed, got the tripod out, and continued shooting.

Nothing much to say about this shot – it’s was basically a matter of “taking a lot of them and choose the best one”. If I remember correctly I did add a lume cube (or maybe a led panel? I’m not sure anymore!) as a secondary source of light, but that was pretty much it.

I would have gone for the same base picture if not for the SOOC constraint, but I would have edited a bit to remove the reflection in the back (which I find distracting) and boost a bit the reflection of the egg shell.

And the Scavenger album: Broken.

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mmF2.8 WR
Focal length	100mm
F-Number	F/32
Exposure time	1.3s
ISO	640

Okay, this was FUN. It took me a little while to remember that we had a LEGO model of the Seattle Space Needle somewhere – so that gave me a direction. (It missed the top part, so I hadto rummage into my LEGO collection to find a way to fix it, that also took a little while, but I think it works.)

Then came the “okay, how do I set this up” question. I wanted some kind of skyline behind it, because it felt right – if only to give the “city” context that may help with the “Seattle” context (because otherwise the whole “Needle” part may be hard to see!). It turns out that Zürich is not exactly rich in skylines view. I might have been able to pull it off somehow, buuuut. If it hadn’t been a SOOC challenge, I might have gone for a composite of some kind… but, well, SOOC means no composite.

Unless…….

A few months ago, I had seen a video about the filming of The Mandalorian: the green screen had been replaced by huge screens and… pretty much used as it was filmed. I suppose it popped back in my mind when I went “waaaait. I could have that skyline displayed on my monitor, that… should work, right?”. I never went to Seattle, but I do have skylines pictures – get a bit of Boston, as seen from Cambridge 😉 I actually quite like using the skyline from another city: it’s my kind of cheeky, I guess. Here’s what the setup looked like:

You’ll note the creativity in the pile of stuff that I put under the Space Needle 😉

Then came the second guessing – was that… cheating? The Boston picture has definitely been taken a long time ago (and outside of the Scavenger Hunt dates, obviously), and that one HAD been processed. But, hey, it’s an original picture that uses practical special effects to achieve a SOOC picture within the theme 😉 And, as a nice bonus surprise, the reflection in the tower in the back works pretty well with the Needle in the front

Now, I’m not COMPLETELY happy with that image – in particular, the Needle is a bit crooked, which is unfortunate. I had images with a better verticality, but the border of the screen was visible… which I only saw after I had put everything back in its place 😦 Still, that’s… very much the same concept, with a tiny bit of cropping and cleaning up.

And for the album of my fellow Scavengers: Needle (careful, some of these are scary 😀 )

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	Pentax D FA 24-70mm F2.8
Focal length	24 to 70 mm (moved it around)
F-Number	F/11
Exposure time	2.5 s
ISO	320

The “In-camera motion blur” item of the list was the topic of some pretty entertaining debates about what constitutes “in-camera”, what constitutes “motion blur”, and what constitutes “in-camera motion blur”. And technically, my first idea of the word was to go take pictures of moving trains, which would have been motion blur, but not in the way it was meant 😉 My final interpretation of the word ended up being “A picture where the camera is intentionally moved during exposure”, and that’s what I did.

I had noticed this long walking tunnel a few months ago as “a place where there’s probably a way to play with a camera”, and I was thinking about it for another word. And then I started playing indeed, wondered if I could do something with the motion blur, spent a fair amount of time looking weird taking pictures of a tunnel while moving, zooming, and generally speaking trying to get some interesting picture. I liked this one most because of the faint presence of the woman walking – I thought it added a bit of interest (although she’s not necessarily that visible on first glance.)

This may be the one where I regretted the SOOC constraint most, because as it is, it lacks some contrast, I think; but I’m writing that sentence before I try editing it, so let’s see what I can do with it now!

And you know what? I kind of like it. It’s very different from what I’d usually go for – hell, it may be the first time I ADD grain to an image, but I think it actually works as an image.

As for the Scavenger album, it’s there: Motion.

The time for the 29th Scavenger Hunt reveals is almost upon us – so I prepared 10 posts (11 if I include this one) to present what I did – with a bit of context, behind the scenes, etc etc 🙂

This round, dubbed “Back to Basics”, had a very specific rule: no edits. No crop, no color fixing, no fixing of That Pesky Fleck Of Dust That I’ve Been Removing In Postproc For Months Now, nothing. Straight Out Of the Camera – SOOC. Granted, the interpretation of “SOOC” has been interesting, especially since there’s a bunch of smart-asses in the Scavengers community (as a card-bearing smart-ass, I would know 😉 ), and the “is this and that and possibly that allowed and what constitutes an edit?” started flying in the minutes following the announcement of the SOOC rule.

The “somewhat-agreed-upon” interpretation of the rule has been “whatever your camera, whatever it is, dumps as a JPG if you don’t apply creative filters on it”. Setting the white balance was fair game; setting the camera as B&W was not 🙂 So I setup my camera back in RAW+JPG for the duration of the Hunt (I had been shooting “only RAW” for a few months, finally realizing that… I never used the JPG in practice), and there we go.

This has been an interesting hunt. I spent far more time shooting the “studio” shots to get them Just Right – I definitely summoned my inner perfectionist (she’s hiding somewhere, I promise!) The thing is – since I had taken the habit in the past few hunts of showing a small “before/after”, well – this doesn’t work as well this time around. There are still a couple of non-trivial shots in there where the “behind the scenes” is somewhat justified; and for all of them, I went for “This is what I submitted / This is what I would have submitted otherwise”.

So… ready for the reveals? As I’m typing this, the pictures in the top image are blurred and the list of words is empty; I intend to come back to this post and update it as I go. But if you see this in its first iteration… well, you’ll have to wait a bit!

The list:

• Coffee
• Egg
• In-camera motion blur
• Needle
• Water
• Broken
• Path
• … TO BE CONTINUED!