Tag: Photography

52Frames – Week 15 – Blue Hour

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I’ve been waiting for reasonable weather all week last week to shoot Blue Hour for 52Frames. That… kind of didn’t happen, so Sunday evening came and I still didn’t have a shot. I was determined to not let my streak end, so this one is somewhat of a placeholder, I guess – it’s not what I would have wanted to get for this theme, but it’s what I got!

I had a first pretty bad shot with a bike traveling in that red/copper light, so I waited a bit for another bike to appear, and it worked out 🙂 The weather on top of the Uetliberg was actually pretty nice, in a foggy/ethereal way.

I don’t think it was quite the blue hour yet when I shot the picture – I compensated a bit in post-processing by giving a bit of a bluer tone, as well as boosting the reds to have a better contrast on the light in the street.

52Frames – Week 14 – Food Photography

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The theme for last week’s 52Frames was Food Photography. I’ve taken enough pictures for our food blog that I know what I like and how to get at least decent food pictures. Since natural light is the main ingredient of that, and since we don’t have that much of that at dinner time, it kind of meant “lunch picture”. Our typical meals may not necessarily be the most appetizing because they may lack structure, so I chose to go for a simple one, with literally no cooking and just setting things up on the plate – avocado and salmon 🙂

52Frames – 2019 Weeks 12 and 13 – “Old” and “New”

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I forgot to post last week’s 52Frames, so I’m doing two posts in one!

This was my entry for “Old“. I bought flowers for another project (and because I wanted flowers), and they wilted (half on purpose because I knew this could work for the “Old” theme. I actually took a bunch of picture of that one, and this one was the one I preferred for that theme. (I have another one that I like a lot and for another theme, but shhhh, it’s still a secret for a few weeks!)

My entry for “New” is definitely in the “consistency shots” category – that is, a wholly uninspired picture that kind of fits the theme, for the sole purpose of not breaking the streak. So: I did not break my streak (this was my 13th week in a row, woo!), and also we have new plates and cutlery 😛

52Frames – 2019 Week 11 – Experimental Photography

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The theme for 52Frames this week was “Experimental Photography“. I have a fondness for pretty rocks/minerals, and I was thinking these days they’d be a nice photography subject (that doesn’t move too much). So last week I pushed the door of a mineralogy shop, and I got out with a few specimens to start experimenting.

This one is a chalcopyrite, and it comes from Wallis, Switzerland. Taking the picture was a matter of taking a lot of them and stack them using Zerene – which I had used successfully a few months ago for the Macro theme. I’m however super unhappy with this picture for a number of reasons:

  • I hadn’t fixed my white balance and ISO, which meant my pictures were not as consistent as they should have been.
  • The light was crap, and the shadow below/left is not pretty.
  • I have an ugly purple fringe on the left that’s ugly, and I’m not sure if it’s a matter of light, of lens, or both.
  • I used my lens at its longer focal (300) – by mistake, but I didn’t double-check what I was doing – and I think it’s not as sharp there as it would be at 200.
  • My white paper background is getting very dusty and I should change it.

So, all in all – many mistakes were made… but that also means that many lessons were learnt, and that next one will be better!

52Frames – 2019 Week 10 – Symmetry

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This is probably the latest I shot my 52Frames submission so far – since I did that on Sunday evening! But I didn’t fail, and there we go: a Symmetry submission.

Again, initial lack of inspiration (this is becoming a theme :/ ) until I remembered the tiles from Azul, which have very pretty symmetric patterns. I decided to add a bit more to the symmetry by stacking them into a symmetric pattern; since they are transparent, they also play pretty well with a back light (although I’m not entirely happy with the shadow at the bottom, which I didn’t manage to get rid of, neither during the shooting nor during the postprocessing).

It was also probably one of my fastest “start setting up things to processed picture” for what I’d qualify as “studio work” 😉

52Frames – 2019 Week 09 – Negative space

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I’ve had a hard time coming up with an idea for this week’s 52Frames‘ theme, Negative Space (with an extra credit “In the studio”). My first impulse was to try to find some intricate piece of… SOMETHING, and to go the “product photography” way, on white clean background.

Well, I missed the nice light because I was doing something else, and I got the idea of trying to play with small, very direct lights instead. So I started playing around with a couple of tiny IKEA LED spots, saw the halo, wondered what I could put in there, and got the idea of someone making a speech.

Snuggles was around (say hi to Snuggles), so he became the focus of my attention; the thing on which he’s leaning (after much effort trying to find the right height and form factor) is an oven dish wrapped in a microfiber cloth 😛 Oh, and the black background is a large piece of black fabric that I use a lot whenever I need a black background.

52Frames – 2019 Week 07 – Uncommon

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The theme for 52Frames this week was Uncommon. I’ll admit that this kind of theme is not necessarily my cup of tea, because I find it too wide. And the extra credit “Portrait of a stranger” gets “all the nopes” from me, so that didn’t work as a “helpful restriction”.

Thankfully, we had a very nice full-moon this week – a “supermoon”, even (I missed the completely full moon, but oh well), and it happened to hide behind my neighbour’s balcony when it first rose. I thought the Moon “trapped” in a prison-like grid was uncommon enough to submit it for this week’s theme 🙂

The shot itself was not very difficult – my cheap Sigma telephoto lens is actually good enough to get reasonable results, both in terms of exposure (f/11, 1/250ms, ISO adjusted as required) and in terms of focus – that’s really the hard part, but I think I’m getting the gist of it now (yay for focus peaking and live view zoom!).