The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Choose a color”. There was an extra credit for “Use a generator”, but the generator gave me “agate grey”, which felt uninspiring (but I still got a piece of agate in here!).
I chose “Blue, first because I was considering using my blue desk mat as a background – but then it’s more aqua than blue, so I used my blanket instead. And I gathered a bunch of blue stuff around the house – including, obviously, one of the infamous blue bowls!
I wasn’t home for last week’s 52Frames, and I hadn’t taken my camera with me – which made the “Single Focal Point” theme a bit challenging (it’s typically the kind of theme where you do want focus and aperture control!). I still took a few pictures in the garden with my phone, and I edited this one to submit it in the last minute. I’ve honestly submitted worse images to 52Frames 😉
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Common object”, with a side dish of “Product photography”. My coffee machine has a delightful lighting of the coffee cup below it, so I took advantage of that and of the spot of light of the plants behind it to get a low-key image of an espresso pouring.
The 35th Scavenger Hunt had a very colorful theme, because there’s all colors of the rainbow in it, and then some. It took me a while to manage to find a way to get a set of pictures that would look like a proper set. My first idea was to try to do something around food photography; some of the colors dissuaded me. I finally landed on the idea of doing something I had wanted to do for a long time: playing with water and oil and soap to make BUBBLES. Not all the pictures have all these components, but I tried to keep a uniting “bubbles/droplets” theme while trying to provide some variation on the technique to get cohesive, but different images.
I had actually done a “rainbow-and-droplets” theme for a previous Hunt, which was sad, because now I needed a new idea. I had had some fun results with the pixels of my tablet on another picture recently, so I decided to lean into that for the Rainbow shot. I first created an image to display on said tablet:
I didn’t know where I was going exactly, so I gave myself options with a rainbow background and more rainbows. Incidentally, this taught me how to create my own gradients with multiple colors, so that was useful 🙂 This gave me something to display on my tablet. Then I played with a few variations of liquids and water, and finally settled on a window cleaner sprinkler full of water to sprinkle my screen with small droplets. Finally, took pictures, decided for a shot, edited the shot, and that’s the last shot for this Hunt!
| 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 | 1/125 |
| ISO | 800 |
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Rainbow album.
For this week’s 52Frames, the theme was Silhouette, with an extra credit for “Use Studio Lighting”. Since it was studio, it felt “right” to try to find something in my house to photograph and, lo and behold, I have LEGO!
I setup things on the balcony last night after sunset. The light is a couple of Lume cubes, one with a red filter and one with a yellow filter, reflecting light on the white wall of the balcony. The edit was a bit of a pain, because my balcony wall is not smooth and had a line in the middle – the edit is not perfect (I still see shadows of the line), but I’m still happy with it. I’m particularly happy with the light tones, I must say 🙂
The 35th Scavenger Hunt had a very colorful theme, because there’s all colors of the rainbow in it, and then some. It took me a while to manage to find a way to get a set of pictures that would look like a proper set. My first idea was to try to do something around food photography; some of the colors dissuaded me. I finally landed on the idea of doing something I had wanted to do for a long time: playing with water and oil and soap to make BUBBLES. Not all the pictures have all these components, but I tried to keep a uniting “bubbles/droplets” theme while trying to provide some variation on the technique to get cohesive, but different images.
For White, I went for bubbles, but not the oil-in-water kind. I recently bought a new coffee machine that also has a milk system; for this picture, I used that to get a white foam! I lit it from below, and my camera thought it was far more yellow than it actually was, but I still liked the bubble structure very much, so that’s what I ended up editing and submitting.
| Camera | Pentax K-1 II |
| Lens | smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR |
| Focal length | 100 mm |
| F-Number | F/7.1 |
| Exposure time | 1/100 |
| ISO | 100 |
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the White album.
The 35th Scavenger Hunt had a very colorful theme, because there’s all colors of the rainbow in it, and then some. It took me a while to manage to find a way to get a set of pictures that would look like a proper set. My first idea was to try to do something around food photography; some of the colors dissuaded me. I finally landed on the idea of doing something I had wanted to do for a long time: playing with water and oil and soap to make BUBBLES. Not all the pictures have all these components, but I tried to keep a uniting “bubbles/droplets” theme while trying to provide some variation on the technique to get cohesive, but different images.
For Black, I deviated a bit from my initial concept – I wanted to have drops of water on a black background. Turns out that getting clean drops of water does not work on any surface! And the best thing I got was… the screen of my tablet. I painstakingly added my drops of water one by one with a small pipette, and started taking some pictures. You may have seen another one of these in another post – I figured the images were different enough to submit to both 52Frames and the Hunt from the same set. I really liked this one – the reflection of the window at the bottom was a happy accident that gives more volume – they kind of look like they each have their own socle! And they kind of look like astronaut helmets too.
| 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 | 1/50 |
| ISO | 800 |
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Black album.
The 35th Scavenger Hunt had a very colorful theme, because there’s all colors of the rainbow in it, and then some. It took me a while to manage to find a way to get a set of pictures that would look like a proper set. My first idea was to try to do something around food photography; some of the colors dissuaded me. I finally landed on the idea of doing something I had wanted to do for a long time: playing with water and oil and soap to make BUBBLES. Not all the pictures have all these components, but I tried to keep a uniting “bubbles/droplets” theme while trying to provide some variation on the technique to get cohesive, but different images.
Violet did not start well. It’s the last picture I shot (before the “bonus” picture), and I felt I was getting at the end of what I could achieve on my theme. And…. it turns out that it’s my favorite for this round. I started by searching ideas for violet things on Google, and saw “amethyst” very early on. And hey, amethyst is significantly overrepresented in my tiny rock collection! So I started playing with my amethyst in various containers, moving water back and forth and being generally tired. I remember snapping this one because the lines of bubbles was uncommon – I still have no idea how that one happened, I thought there was a hair, but there wasn’t. I think that at that time there was mostly water, and the oil was mostly leftovers from surfaces and not really added per se. When I came back to my computer, I was very happy with what I was seeing – and particularly the fact that it was indeed sharp enough to use. I love how this looks like a starry night and/or a nebula, and I’m incredibly happy with this picture. The original image gives a better idea of the amethyst at the bottom!
| 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 | 1/125 |
| ISO | 800 |
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Violet album.
The 35th Scavenger Hunt had a very colorful theme, because there’s all colors of the rainbow in it, and then some. It took me a while to manage to find a way to get a set of pictures that would look like a proper set. My first idea was to try to do something around food photography; some of the colors dissuaded me. I finally landed on the idea of doing something I had wanted to do for a long time: playing with water and oil and soap to make BUBBLES. Not all the pictures have all these components, but I tried to keep a uniting “bubbles/droplets” theme while trying to provide some variation on the technique to get cohesive, but different images.
Coming up with Indigo took me a long while, mostly because I’m not even entirely sure how to DEFINE indigo (And, apparently, I’m not the only one: Indigo#Classification as a spectral color.) The color definition seems to vary between “dark blue” and “blue with purplish hues”, and then whatever is dyed with indigo dye can also end up in various shades of blue. I’m pretty sure this is a word I never use spontaneously when talking about colors. I did want to go vaguely in the direction of “between dark blue and purple”, but I also didn’t want to do something that would be confused for purple. All in all, this means that the “indigo” picture was one that I left for the end of this Hunt.
It also meant that I needed to find something in the correct hue for the pictures, and that was not obvious either. I finally noticed that our dinner trays are somewhat in the blue/purple/indigo shades, and that’s what I ended up using as a background. I used significantly more dish soap for this image than for the others, so the bubbles are very distinct; the sadder point is that there’s a few spots of larger visibly soapy bubbles, and I would have preferred the picture without them, I think. I still very much liked the effect, especially around the white border, that seem to give a lot of depth to the bubble; this made me keep more of the white background in the final image than I was initially planning to.
| Camera | Pentax K-1 II |
| Lens | smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR |
| Focal length | 100 mm |
| F-Number | F/4.5 |
| Exposure time | 1/200 |
| ISO | 800 |
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Indigo album.
The 35th Scavenger Hunt had a very colorful theme, because there’s all colors of the rainbow in it, and then some. It took me a while to manage to find a way to get a set of pictures that would look like a proper set. My first idea was to try to do something around food photography; some of the colors dissuaded me. I finally landed on the idea of doing something I had wanted to do for a long time: playing with water and oil and soap to make BUBBLES. Not all the pictures have all these components, but I tried to keep a uniting “bubbles/droplets” theme while trying to provide some variation on the technique to get cohesive, but different images.
“Blue” is the second image I shot for this set. I wanted a bit of texture, so I shot on top of blue, soft blanket. There’s not much water in this picture, because I wanted the blue texture to come forward; I had to shepherd the oil/soap bubbles together to get some structure. I’m very happy wit the shadows on this image – Lume cube to the rescue! When I first opened these, I fell for the top-left shadow globules, which I found so very cute. I picked the sharpest image I had in that set, and worked on it until I got the final version.
| 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 | 1/125 |
| ISO | 250 |
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Blue album.
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