The theme for 52Frames this week was “Negative Space”. There isn’t much of a leap between “Negative Space” and a blank page, and I got myself a new fountain pen this week (first in year, possibly decades) (well. Pilot Parallel Pens don’t really count 🙂 ), so there, a journal blank page with a fountain pen 🙂
A friend asked me yesterday whether I was up for an attempt at comet photography – since Neowise is currently visible in our skies. I hadn’t seen it yet, because it was either visible very early or quite late, but these days it’s visible around 23:30, which is… past my bedtime, but we don’t see comets every day, so I made an effort 😉
We went a bit outside of the city and, after a bit of meandering, found a spot where the comet was visible and there weren’t too much other lights around. (Note: roads in Switzerland have waaaay too many street lights.)
After a bit of fumbling (I need to train my camera gear manipulation in the dark!), including a very embarrassing “oh, THAT’S why I don’t have anything on my pictures! <removes the lens cap>”, I finally settled into trying to take pictures of stars 🙂
I don’t have much experience in astrophotography (… yet?), but I’ve shot the moon and the like enough that I do know a couple of things:
So I took some comet pictures, and it was nice, and I have one where you can see the double tail:
Looking in other parts of the sky, well. I had never seen that many shooting stars, and I definitely saw multiple yesterday. Someone mentioned that the two brighter spots we could see were planets – and indeed a quick check on phones established them to be Saturn and Jupiter, quite close from one another in the sky. There were attempts to see Saturn’s rings, but we didn’t have the right hardware for that, but… I HAVE JUPITER’S MOONS.
I am honestly amazed – I would NOT have expected that to be a/ at all visible b/ capturable with a 70mm lens 🙂 When it comes to astronomy and astrophotography, I definitely have more “star-struck” and “starry-eyed” enthusiasm than knowledge – although I actually learnt stuff yesterday. I also know that my camera DOES have an astrotracing feature, but I didn’t manage to make it work properly yesterday, I think. MORE EXPERIMENTS WARRANTED. Also, next time I shoot Jupiter, I probably need to take into account the fact that it’s ACTUALLY SUPER BRIGHT. Aaand I need to read up on astro photography processing, because right now I have no idea what I’m doing and there’s a fair chance it makes no sense (but the pictures are pretty!)
So, there. All in all, I’ll consider this astrophotography session a large success (because it makes me want to do more of it 🙂 ). I have some more pictures available in the full album: Neowise and Jupiter.
For 52Frames, this week, the idea was to give up some control and to give a picture to edit to “someone else”. There was a handy sign-up sheet with 52Framers offering their services and what they were willing to work with; my editor for this picture of a pretty rock was Mary Lesh.
I usually work better within a set of constraints; the 52Frames constraints are actually usually slightly too loose for my taste, and without a guiding theme, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. I considered going outside for a few shots (I noticed a few things I want to get in my camera recently), but my “social budget” for the day was tapped out, so I decided to stay home with my studio.
When it comes to studio, I do like photographing minerals. I also knew that this would give some leeway/freedom to my editor: they could either focus on the details, or take advantage of the space around the rock. And I had this very pretty rock (as far as I can tell, barite & vanadinite?) that hadn’t been in front of my camera yet. This is the image I sent to Mary (exported from RAW to JPG with no settings changed):
| Camera | Pentax K-1 II |
| Lens | smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro |
| Focal length | 50mm |
| F-Number | F/32.0 |
| Exposure time | 8 s |
| ISO | 125 |
I thought it’d be fun to do a parallel edit to see what could be done starting with the same image 🙂 I must say that I was looking for the same kind of crop as Mary sent to me, but for the life of me couldn’t “find” it. So I flipped the image (and not the table) and went for a much closer crop, and ended up with this:
Mary told me she’d left a lot of white space if I wanted to add a quote or something. I must say that I like the idea a lot, and that it had not crossed my mind ever before. Aaaand I do like the white space as it is too.
This was, for me, a very interesting experiment, even starting with a shot as basic as the one I submitted. Thanks Mary for playing that game with me!
The theme for 52Frames this week was Complementary Colors (I chose Red/Green) – which works particularly well with colorful board game pieces such as meeples. I grabbed a couple of these, and I saw my Rubik’s Cube in the shelf – so I threw it in the picture as well. And then I did something I hadn’t done yet: I used Lightroom to edit the picture.
I had a profound lack of motivation for this week – which means that I started shooting around 21:30, which may well be a new record. My goal was to “Just Shoot Something” and not break the streak – and the very first version was just the three meeples on the cube shot with a phone on the table. But I realize I couldn’t even manage to click “take the picture” on the phone – I felt the need to grab the softbox (which has a white background, at least) and a Lume cube (see previous remark about 21:30 – even 2 weeks awy from the solstice, it’s getting dark!). And then I tried to take the picture again with the phone, grumbled a bit, grabbed the camera and took a couple of pictures.
And then… well, then, I installed Lightroom. I’ve been experimenting with switching back to Windows after 15-20 years of Linux usage. And one of the reasons for that (by far not the only one) is “this way I can give Lightroom a try”. I’ve been using Darktable on Linux for quite some time now, and I do love the project and the software. They’re really doing a terrific job. Buuuuuuuuuuuut. I don’t particularly enjoy processing pictures (unless I’m doing specific creative edits). And I must admit that “dammit, Lightroom streamlined that thing A Lot.” I very much enjoy Darktable’s creative options, but when it comes to speed and automation of edits, I cannot deny that Lightroom does a great job, at least as far as my first perfunctory tests go. I was also expecting to fight and sweat my way through it… and I didn’t.
All in all – no, it’s not a great picture – it’s neither very creative nor technically flawless. But I still learnt more today than I expected, and it started with “I’M NOT LOSING MY 52FRAMES STREAK”.
The theme for 52Frames this week was “Flashlight”, with a secondary theme of “Light painting”. I will admit I cheated a tiny bit – I didn’t use a flashlight per se, but a Lume cube – because my Lume cubes have easy-to-snap-on color filters, and I wanted purple, because why not.
Very straightforward shot – setup camera in a dark room, setup long exposition, draw infinite symbol with a purple light, choose best among 12 (which was the number I managed to do before the Lume cube became uncomfortably warm), edit and ship 🙂
The Paper Abstract theme got significantly easier when I remembered I had a fair amount of origami paper somewhere in a drawer. I had started trying to organize them along the rainbow, but the colors I had were not exactly right for that.
Then I built some color wheel type of thing, and it worked somewhat better, because I could work by what “felt” close more than what “should be” close in the context of the rainbow. And then came the assembly. I didn’t know at this time where I was going or what I was doing – the “circular” thing appealed to me, and initially I was going for some kind of wheel or half-wheel kind of picture. So for the assembly, well, I worked around accordion shapes by folding each color and using the folds to carry my structure.
The first images were made with only the folds holding the structure; at some point I got tired of swearing every time it broke, so I added a drop of glue between every pair of sheets of paper to hold them in place. Less creative flexibility, better mood 😉
And then, basically, I played with my accordion of colors and with some lights and my camera. I ended up liking a few details of a particular picture, namely the light reflection and the curve of the tiny hole at the base of the image, and that became my submission for this theme. This is the original picture, with only minor RAW development operations:
| Camera | Pentax K-1 II |
| Lens | smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro |
| Focal length | 50mm |
| F-Number | F/9.0 |
| Exposure time | 1/80 s |
| ISO | 320 |
Since this was an abstract, I started playing with different orientations of the picture – and liked the one I submitted best. Edits apart from that were pretty straightforward and more “RAW developing” than “real” edits in my view.
For more interpretations of the theme, see the Paper Abstract Scavenger album!
“White” is the first word I shot for this Hunt. I knew early on that I really wanted a fully white picture, textured in some way; I just didn’t know which texture would be interesting and fun to shoot. It was literally a matter of “shower thoughts” – I washed my hair and saw the shampoo form a thick white foam at the bottom of the shower, and went “ooooh”. A few days later, I spent some time in my bathroom with more clothes and more camera gear, and I started experimenting with a variety of foam pictures. I lit everything with a Lume cube in one hand (and/or sitting on the border of the shower) and the camera in the other (no tripod was involved in this picture :P), shot a bunch of pictures and decided afterwards which would yield the best results once cropped and processed.
This is the original picture, with only minor RAW development operations:
| Camera | Pentax K-1 II |
| Lens | HD PENTAX-D FA 24-70mm F2.8 ED SDM WR |
| Focal length | 58mm |
| F-Number | F5.6 |
| Exposure time | 1/50 s |
| ISO | 320 |
As it is, it took a fair amount of rotating and cropping and editing to get a proper white foam picture, especially since I wanted to avoid the very large hot spot on the left (which was still the light that allowed me to get reasonably contrasted bubbles).
For more interpretations of the theme, see the White Scavenger album!
For Keys, I wanted to avoid taking pictures of my home keys, because that was boring and possibly somewhat dangerous to put on the Internet 😛 I also happen to have an Allen key on my keychain, so that was an option; then I thought about piano (I don’t have a piano), keyboard (I do have a lot of keyboards, but no fun idea with them), sheet music keys…. guitar keys!
Once the idea was there, the realization was fairly straightforward – guitar, Lume cube, dark background, SHIP IT!
| Camera | Pentax K-1 II |
| Lens | smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro |
| Focal length | 50mm |
| F-Number | F/10 |
| Exposure time | 1 s |
| ISO | 250 |
I did a first pass on Darktable to develop the raw to my liking:
Then there’s been some long and painful edit to get rid of the textured background, which I kind of liked per se, but which was distracting in the context of the picture. Keeping the small star of reflection a the bottom of the bottom key was also a large pain.
I’m not super happy with the fact that the bottom key is out of the depth of field (focus stacking may have helped, because I was already at F/10…), but apart from that, I don’t hate the image.
For more interpretations of the theme, see the Keys Scavenger album!
This was the last word for which I got ANY inspiration in this Hunt – although I did re-shoot another one after this one. Talk about uninspiring: I’m profoundly not a shoes person, I don’t own anything remotely interesting in this area, and this is not an area of interest. I vaguely thought about the hot shoe camera mount, but again, nothing came after that. And then I did remember that there IS a shoe token in Monopoly, and that I DO own a copy of Monopoly. So I setup a board, I even re-read the rules quickly to make sure that whatever I was putting on that board was remotely believable, and I got my shoe shot. This is the original picture, with only minor RAW development operations:
| Camera | Pentax K-1 II |
| Lens | smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro |
| Focal length | 50mm |
| F-Number | F/2.8 |
| Exposure time | 1/80 s |
| ISO | 125 |
Veeery straightforward edit/development – I didn’t even crop anything (which is very rare) – I did add vignetting, though, because it made sense for me for the mood I wanted to give to the image.
For more interpretations of the theme, see the Shoes Scavenger album!
My initial train of thought for the word “Connected” was to play with an “ET-like” image, with a finger and an Ethernet cable. And then, for the first “post-soft-lockdown” walk we did, I ran into (not literally) some power lines. Which means that I have a fair amount of power lines pictures in that roll 😉 I chose the one which was the most geometrically appealing to me. This is the original picture, with only minor RAW development operations:
| Camera | Pentax K-1 II |
| Lens | HD PENTAX-D FA 24-70mm F2.8 ED SDM WR |
| Focal length | 40mm |
| F-Number | F/9.0 |
| Exposure time | 1/80 s |
| ISO | 200 |
The post-processing was a bit of crop&rotate, some exposure and contrast fixing, and obviously the B&W treatment. Nothing particularly fancy, but this is one of my favorite picture for this hunt 🙂
A friend of mine suggested I may have wanted to flip the image vertically, so that the triangles of the image would point up instead of down. This is not an option I had considered, and I’m happy he did for me 😉 I tested the image that way, and here’s how it looks:
I’m probably very biased because I don’t like being wrong, but I actually like it less that way. The cable coming from the bottom left of the image ended up coming from the top left, and that leading line consequently feels weaker. Somehow, the light on the right also feels weirder; I also like the pylon at the top more than at the bottom. All in all: I’m standing by my accidental choice 😉
For more interpretations of the theme, see the Connected Scavenger album!
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