Tag: Photography

Scavenger Hunt #29 – What do you mean, SOOC?

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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:

52Frames – 2020-40 – Blue

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The theme for 52Frames this week was Blue. I tried different approaches but they were either not looking good or not blue enough; I’m not suuuuper convinced by this shot, but this is the best I have and I was out of ideas to make it better. So, there, have some curaçao.

And yes, I bought a bottle of curaçao because this week’s theme was Blue.

52Frames – 2020-38 – A Chair

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The theme for 52Frames this week was A Chair. I’ll admit this is mostly a “placeholder shot” – took it today after 6PM “urgh, haven’t done 52Frames yet, I need to fix that”. We got a couple of balcony chairs since last year (and congratulating ourselves for them every day 😉 ); since they have a meshy texture, I thought it could be fun to take a picture of one through the second one. And, there.

52Frames – 2020-37 – Single Focal Point

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The theme for 52Frames this week was Single Focal Point, with an extra credit of f/1.4. Pierre made some pie this afternoon – so I took the liberty of bothering him with my camera while he was doing that.

Since I wanted the extra credit, I took my only lens that’s able to open to f/1.4, which is a non-macro 50mm, which made focusing somewhat difficult: I have been shooting with a macro lens a lot lately, and this one has a much longer focusing distance! But eventually, I got there.

I ended up taking 300 pictures – and the one I chose was the last one 😉 So I guess I’m titling this one “Finishing touch” – that’s the last piece of pear that goes on that pie! Oh, and if you want the recipe for the pie, my husband wrote it down 15 years ago in French here: Tarte poire / frangipane / chocolat 😉

52Frames – 2020-36 – Combine three challenges

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The 52Frames challenge this week was to “Combine three challenges” – with the list of the previous challenges for this year thankfully provided. I’ve been trying to keep the list in my mind for most of the week because I knew that I needed to think about what I wanted to do. I went through several ideas, but in the end I guess that a couple of things clicked.

I’ve done enough portrait/self-portraits to be very annoyed at stray hair; so for once I really wanted to embrace these. And by that, I mean that I did brush my hair a lot so that they’d get more electric and have more texture.

I’m also currently watching Glee, and in one of the episodes that I watched this week, there was someone who was backlit on a dark background, and it did make me go “huh. I should try that.” The places where you find new things to try 😉

Anyway – I started playing with a spot, a tripod and a black curtain, with the objective of shooting 1/ Self-Portrait 2/ Low-Key 3/ A Different Angle. And I guess that we have bonus Details and Negative Space in there too 🙂

52Frames – 2020-35 – A Common Object

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The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “A common object”, with an extra credit for “One light source”. So I locked myself in my room, closed the door and blinds, got a Lume cube and a pair of earphones (which I thought would yield both some texture and some shape), and got to work.

It took me a little while to find the “right” angle – suspending the earphones on top of the light ended up being the right move for me.

52Frames – 2020-34 – Rule of Odds

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The theme for 52Frames this week was Rule of Odds. I was not very inspired by the topic, but I still have a new macro lens, so I thought I’d go for something small, and I ended up with buttons.

That’s from a grey shirt, which probably is no stranger to the fact that I processed it in B&W – I hesitated because the buttons are metal/brass-y colored, but the B&W gives more leeway to go crazy with texture enhancements, so there we go!

52Frames – 2020-33 – Night Photography

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The theme for 52Frames this week was Night Photography, and I kind of intended to submit some astro (which was actually the extra credit theme) – but since we had a bit of thunderstorm this evening, I took that opportunity instead.

This is a composite of two pictures: I was NOT lucky enough to get both the lightning and such nice car trails at the same time 😉 (Also, the car trails exposure is longer than the lightning one). I must admit that Photoshop made it super easy to combine these two – I just set both my pictures as layers, put a “gimme the lightest” setting on my layers merging, and boom, done 😉 Much easier than I was expecting (I was expecting to have to do that manually).

52Frames – 2020-32 – A New Experience

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The theme for 52Frames this week was “A New Experience”. It turns out that, for reasons unrelated to 52Frames, I finally got the Pentax 100mm/2.8 macro lens I had been coveting for a while – as far as “new experiences” go, “playing with a new lens” definitely fit the bill in my book.

We went for a small walk today in a woody area – I’m glad I stopped for a little bit to catch this one!

52Frames – 2020-31 – Water

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The theme for 52Frames this week was “Water”, with an extra credit for “Using an ND filter”. Turns out that I DO have an ND filter that I had never really used, and that I had wanted to go take pictures of this place on the Sihl (which has been less than 1km from my apartment for the last 12 years…) for a while.

So I got my photo bag, my tripod and my ND filter, and I went to take a few pictures. Turns out, even with said ND filter (which is only a 4-stop filter), I wasn’t able to increase the exposure length as much as I wanted to at this time (it was roughly 6PM). So there’s two things I know: 1/ I’ll probably get a stronger ND filter at some point 2/ I’ll need to go back there on a less bright day/at a later (or earlier?) time.

But anyway, I got the shot, including the extra credit, and that’s yet another one on the streak 🙂