My recent 52Frames have felt uninspired and perfunctory – but I still didn’t break my streak, so there is that. However, I’ve been remiss in posting them here – let’s fix that!
2022-17 – Leading Lines
Not much to say here – I needed leading lines, I got leading lines 😛
2022-18 – Flat lay
Flat lay tends to work reasonably well with board games – and we got Terra Mystica out of its box last week-end, so that worked out well 🙂
2022-19 – Architecture
I happened to be near Bellevue this week-end for the Architecture theme, and I didn’t have a picture of the Opernhaus yet. That is now fixed – although I’d have ideas to get a better picture – once the circus that was behind me is gone, that is 😛
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Lamp”, with an extra challenge “One click” (take a single picture and use that). We have a “Death Star”-like lamp shade, and it has a controllable color bulb in it: enough to get a cool abstract image! (I may or may not have made the lamp shade fall before taking a picture of it. Oops.)
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Extreme Close-Up”, explicitly not limited to macro. I went for the easy shot of opening a drawer, opening my color pencils case, and taking a picture of that; uninspired, yes, one more week, also yes. (Hoping to get more motivation for photography eventually some time soon!)
The theme for last week’s 52Frames was “Nature”. The weather was good and I could have gone for a more “exotic” piece of nature, but I still have a week of walking with crutches, so… not! Thankfully, a plant of thyme decided to start growing between the slabs of my 5th floor balcony. And it currently has little flowers. So, there – you get a picture of my random balcony thyme plant 🙂
The theme for this week’s 52Frame was “Emotion. My first idea was to get a selfie of myself being visibly annoyed at the plastic walking boot that’s enclosing my ankle for another two weeks while my fracture heals, but I decided to get my manikins to use instead. I took a picture in front of my green screen, and composited them on an older background (taken a few years ago on top of the Uetliberg). This is neither a good composite nor a good picture, but eh, it’ll do the job for this week 🙂
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Long shutter”, with an extra credit (which I claimed) for “Light Painting”. I must admit I didn’t give too much thought on the topic of my light painting – it needed to be recognizable and basic enough for my somewhat drawing-challenged self to be able to pull it off in not too much time and takes. A heart looked easy enough when paying a bit of attention, and indeed it worked out okay.
This is a composite of three images: one where I was drawing a heart with a red-filtered Lume cube and a green one in each hand; one where I inverted both cubes, and one where I didn’t have a filter – which I blended negatively in postprocessing (so that I got the cyan, blue and magenta showing there.)
It actually looks fairly decent for the low amount of effort I put in this picture 😉
My goal with Hunt 34 was to do something closer to a “real” Scavenger Hunt and to take all my shots outside in the city. I have a mix of “found shots” and “places I know where I’ll be able to take a shot” for this round, and that felt pretty good. I also have a new, more compact camera than my Pentax “monster” – so I also wanted the opportunity to shoot with it more and get more comfortable with it: my other goal for this Hunt was “everything shot with the Fuji”.
The final composition, “Present”, was something I had in mind all along during this Hunt – I wanted to have, as a final image, “a Scavenger view of Zürich”. I added a blue and white background to represent the colors of the city, and I added my pictures on top of it. I started working with Photoshop, and it was kind of hell, when suddenly I realized I wasn’t doing image processing, I was doing… layout. So I grabbed Publisher, and I was done in less time than I can count 😉 Obviously, there was a couple of “awkward” shots to place – the “Crack” one proved particularly annoying… until I realized it was abstract enough to be able to place it essentially anywhere. I setup the “bridge” image as a centerpiece of the composition, because that’s the most recognizable view of the city. While I didn’t keep with the usual aspect ratio of a postcard, this was mostly the aesthetics I wanted to reach – and I think I mostly managed.
All in all, during all of this Hunt, I wanted to show “my” city, which recently become much more than the city I live in – it’s also the city that accepted me as Swiss citizen at the end of last year, and it’s my “Heimatort” (place of origin) – I’m now, very officially, “from” Zürich, and this was something I wanted to celebrate 🙂
I also thought it’d be neat to have a map of the places where I took pictures: here’s the interactive map link, and here’s a screenshot of it for… posterity:
I knew I was going away for the week, so I did consider doing my 52Frames on Monday… and then saw that the theme was quite compatible with being on holidays. We went on top of the Cimetta during said holidays, and were lucky enough to see some paragliding happening fairly close to us! As soon as I saw that, I knew I had my 52Frames shot locked – and indeed I did – this one is one of many shots I took around that time 🙂
My goal with Hunt 34 was to do something closer to a “real” Scavenger Hunt and to take all my shots outside in the city. I have a mix of “found shots” and “places I know where I’ll be able to take a shot” for this round, and that felt pretty good. I also have a new, more compact camera than my Pentax “monster” – so I also wanted the opportunity to shoot with it more and get more comfortable with it: my other goal for this Hunt was “everything shot with the Fuji”.
My picture for “Music” is a mix of “found shots” and “I know where I’m getting that shot”. The Musik Hug shop was very much in my mind when I took my camera on a walk to get some shots; it also has a room with many Steinway pianos that I was hoping to capture. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a polarizing filter on that lens yet at that time, making my initial plan fail.
But I still turned around the building, and their collection of displayed vinyls caught my eye, mostly because it has one of my favorite albums on display! (Yes, that’s be the Queen one 😉 ). And when I realized that the St.-Peter church (and Europe’s largest church clock face!) was visible in the reflection… well, if you can’t beat’em join’em – it actually made me happy to get a better picture for my overarching “Zürich” theme than I would have gotten if I had gone with my first idea – it’s actually one of my favorite pictures for this round :). Here’s the initial picture:
Camera
Fujifilm X-30 II
Lens
Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length
18 mm
F-Number
F/3.6
Exposure time
1/60s
ISO
2000
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Music album.
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Low key”, with an additional (claimed) challenge for “Bodyscape”. I don’t have much courage nor interest to take pictures of body parts other than hands, but I got the idea of making a hilly landscape out of my knuckles. I lit it from behind with lume cube and a yellow/orange filter to yield an impression of sunrise/sunset (I titled that picture “Sunrise on Knuckles Hills” for 52Frames 🙂 ) and shipped it with fairly minimal processing.
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