Tag: Photography

Scavenger Hunt #28 – Mirror

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This is the last picture I took in this hunt, and it is my favorite. I had a previous idea which had to do with some window reflection, and the concept was there, but the image was just not satisfying – so once I got my last shot out of the way to get the set of 10, I went back to the drawing board to get a proper mirror.

Mirrors are highly non trivial to shoot – especially if you don’t really want to be in the picture ! Playing with angles can be fun, but can also be very frustrating when you realize that what you want to do will Just Not Work – because Physics Said So.

I first remembered that we had a few old hard drive platters that make very decent mirrors; after looking for them for a little while, I found them in the cellar in a bag full of steampunky paraphernalia (which we got a few years ago to attend the steampunk-themed wedding of friends of ours). At that point, I hadn’t connected these dots yet – I started playing with the mirrors on the floor, trying to get interesting reflections of the board games shelves, that sort of things. It was not BAD, but it was somewhat underwhelming.

And then I started setting up the whole “let’s have mirrors reflecting the steampunky stuff – on top of that the mirrors are round, I have a lot of circular stuff in there, this may actually be interesting. It took a little while to arrive at a convincing setup of the whole thing – essentially it ended up looking like this, from another angle:

A lot of holding, and clamps, and chains – but these actually work with the theme, somehow, so that’s great! While working with the setup, there was also the question of being able to take a picture of it while not being on the picture myself. I ended up getting the telephoto lens – had a pretty hard time managing to focus it with the low-ish distance I was able to put between the setup scene and the wall, but it eventually worked out. This is the original picture, with only minor RAW development operations:

CameraPentax K-1 II
LensSigma 70-300mm F4-5.6 Macro
Focal length190mm
F-NumberF/25
Exposure time1/15 s
ISO1600

The processing was slightly more heavy-handed than usual on the color side – I thought that the browner hue fitted fairly well with the subject of the image.

For more interpretations of the theme, see the Mirror Scavenger album!

Scavenger Hunt #28 – Meal

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For the Meal theme, I had PLENTY of backups – a friend of mine started a “so, what are y’all eating in this times of lockdown and quarantine?” group, so I had a ton of pictures to choose from, if necessary.

I went for the slightly less obvious theme of “meal preparation” – we made some version of chicken parmigiana, and since this requires quite a bit of setup, I thought it was a good idea. I like taking pictures of that sort of things from above – it gives information, and there’s no “out of focus” issue. Here, the preparation took enough space that getting everything in the picture was a bit of a challenge with my widest lens (which is… not that wide), but I managed still without too much acrobatics. This is the original picture, with only minor RAW development operations:

CameraPentax K-1 II
LensPentax D FA 24-70mm F2.8
Focal length24mm
F-NumberF/9.0
Exposure time1/60 s
ISO320

There was a surprisingly high amount of edition on that picture: as you can see, the setup is pretty cramped, and I ended up having a part of my sink and a part of the yellow surface part of the pictures, which I didn’t want. Fixing that was not hard, but it was somewhat time-intensive.

Other than that, I don’t have many opinions about this picture. I like that the bottom shows a bit of story-telling by giving the coating sequence, but the picture itself feels fairly banal.

For more interpretations of the theme, see the Meal Scavenger album!

Scavenger Hunt #28 – Cozy

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Cozy was tough for me, because my mood during this Hunt was far from cozy. So I’ll admit that this is a case of “finding something that can remotely fit the theme and ship it”. The first “post-soft-lockdown” outing we did was to go see a pond with frogs, so we saw the pond with frogs and I decided that this particular frog DID look fairly cozy.

Then… I’m not a telephoto shooter, essentially – I have one, but it’s a cheap one (advantage: it’s lighter than my main lens; drawback: it kind of lacks light and it’s very fiddly), and I didn’t have it with me on that day. I find telephoto lenses to be generally heavy (well. Physics accounts for that, mostly), to have way too long of a minimum focusing distance for my use case, and to be tough to use with any kind of sharpness without a tripod (especially when the damn thing is not opening :P) – hence, mine is definitely not my “walk-around” lens. Maybe I should give it more shots, though (pun intended) – because for this kind of thing, it would definitely have been beneficial.

This is the original picture, with only minor RAW development operations:

CameraPentax K-1 II
LensHD PENTAX-D FA 24-70mm F2.8 ED SDM WR
Focal length70mm
F-NumberF/10.0
Exposure time1/100 s
ISO400

Again, very straighforward edit. Hi, it’s a frog. It looks cozy.

For more interpretations of the theme, see the Cozy Scavenger album! (Spoiler: it has A LOT of cats.)

52Frames – 2020-24 – Hands

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The theme for 52Frames last week was Hands. My first idea was to go with hands on a keyboard; since we recently got a Switch, I changed my mind and went for the gaming picture!

My first images were with a fast shutter speed – I had taken a few with a slower one to see how it went, I liked them better, so I re-shot with slow shutter speed until I got one that I liked.

Thanks to Pierre for lending me his hands and bearing with me while I was taking pictures of his Wizard of Legend game 😉

CameraPentax K-1 II
Lenssmc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length50mm
F-NumberF/9.0
Exposure time0.5 s
ISO160

Scavenger Hunt #28 – Toilet Paper

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The “Toilet Paper” theme was from the start fairly uninspiring for me. As I’m writing this before the reveals, I’m sure a lot of my Scavenger crew will have wonderfully creative, silly and hilarious takes on the word (And, after publication: can confirm 🙂 ). But that’s just… not me 🙂 However, early in the Hunt, our cleaning lady had store a couple of rolls on top of the bathroom mirror (because the usual station under the sink was overflowing a bit). And that setup caught my eye for a reason in the morning shower, I went “huh”, and I knew what I wanted to do there – play the simplicity, the symmetry, the geometry – these are elements of aesthetics that speak to me, and for which that specific image could work.

Now, it so happens that the bathroom in which we have a shower (and hence the one we mostly use) has very messy reflections in the mirror – said shower, a wall in the middle, and the washing machine/tumble dryer tower. Luckily, the other bathroom is essentially a symmetrical of that one, with only a bathtub – so the mirror reflects the wall. Which works out, kind of.

Because obviously, the challenge there – getting a “clean” reflection in the mirror AND a “clean” geometry…. hrm. So as “boring” as this image may seem initially, it’s actually a composite 😉 And it is the only composite I submitted to this hunt!

These are the two “original” images (minor RAW development applied only – and exposed VERY to the left):

CameraPentax K-1 II
LensHD PENTAX-D FA 24-70mm F2.8 ED SDM WR
Focal length40mm
F-NumberF/5.6
Exposure time1/40 s
ISO200

(same settings block for both pictures.)

And these are the two images that ended up as layers in my GIMP window:

You’ll notice the disappearance of the shower holder and the geometry distortion to get the middle line of the mirror line up with the rolls in the final picture 😉 All in all, I’m quite happy with this picture, because I managed to do what I wanted to do, despite non-trivial challenges. I’m not entirely happy with the visible lens flare (… probably lens flare?) in the middle of the image, but I didn’t manage to correct it cleanly, sooooo it stayed there 🙂

For more interpretations of the theme, see the Toilet Paper Scavenger album!

Scavenger Hunt #28 – Matches

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The interpretation of the theme is very straightforward, but I like this image a lot. It’s the first time I made lit matches pictures (and probably any kind of matches pictures). It made me somewhat nervous initially because of the fire hazard and, while it’s still literally playing with matches, I think the whole ordeal is safer than I initially thought – I probably struck more than 100 matches on that afternoon and I didn’t scare myself once.

I had started with a binder clip to hold the matches, but it was somewhat flimsy; Pierre suggested the third hand instead, and that worked out better. Bonus: while I was expecting it to not appear at all in the final picture, I ended up liking the aesthetics of it A Lot (to me it does have a strong Westworld vibe to it, and I’m all for it).

The final setup ended up looking a lot like this:

Third hand holding the matches, settled on a flimsy light tripod (but with a sturdy, flat tripod head), put on top of oven plates (there to catch ashes and whatever hot stuff may fall from the matches), water and fire blanket on hand, black background far enough that the probability that it accidentally catches fire is very low. And a lighter, because no way I’m going to actually strike the matches to light them in this setup 🙂

And then I shot, re-shot, re-re-shot… Some setup also implied an extra Lume cube moving around at some point – the “out of the camera” images were better, but the reflections on the arm ended up being more distracting than useful. I now have a metric ton of fire pictures in different configurations. This is the original picture, with only minor RAW development operations:

CameraPentax K-1 II
LensHD PENTAX-D FA 24-70mm F2.8 ED SDM WR
Focal length63mm
F-NumberF/5.0
Exposure time1/50 s
ISO400

Nothing particularly fancy on the final edit – the dynamic range between the very bright flames flames and the third hand in the shadows was a bit tricky to handle, but not too bad.

For more interpretations of the theme, see the Matches Scavenger album!

52Frames – 2020-23 – Dancing

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The theme for 52Frames this week was “Dancing”. My lack of inspiration and motivation was clear on this theme – although I don’t have much issues with taking selfies and self-portrait, the idea of using myself as a model for a dancing theme felt…. complicated (both technically and emotionally).

I was discussing the topic with Pierre (which is what I typically do when I lack inspiration – he’s full of ideas 😉 ), I went “actually, I just need a wooden mannequin, pose it, take pictures, done” (such mannequins were used in ads for some wood wax called Ocedar and we do call them ‘bonhomme Ocedar’ – ‘Ocedar guy’ still 😉 ) – and Pierre told me “well, you DO have LEGO Technic figures, which are fairly articulated too”. And: true.

So, I took my LEGO Technic figurine, posed it on a white background, took a couple of pictures, and spent most of the time creating the disco floor to pose it 😉 Luckily and coincidentally, I had downloaded vector grids yesterday on Creative Market (because they were free yesterday, and still are until tomorrow): Grid 01 – that helped a lot in making the floor! I am also quite happy with the effect I managed to have when it comes to the fading in the distance and distant blur.

I’m not SUPER HAPPY with everything though – when I painted the black lines I didn’t compensate the thickness of the line for the perspective. It could probably have been done, but not with the approach I had taken (probably would have required a 3D deformation of a flat grid, that may have worked). I’m also not super happy with the integration of the LEGO guy – despite the shadow (that’s already “too much”, probably), he still looks like he’s hovering a bit. I don’t know how to fix that – it’s better with the shadow than without, but still far from flawless.

Still – theme for this week, DONE.

52Frames – 2020-21 – Symmetry

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The theme for 52Frames this week was Symmetry.

I was initially considering taking pictures of two halves of that eggplant; at the last moment I recruited Pierre to hold the knife while I was taking pictures, using the knife to emphasize an axis of symmetry… which is not perfect, but I think pretty interesting still (you can play “spot the differences” 🙂 ). I did take pictures of the two halves, but they were far less satisfying.

This one is not perfect (I would have had liked to have a better alignment of my camera vertically on the knife, which would also probably have helped with the imbalance of the eggplant halves); I still somehow don’t hate it. And my eggplant was cut anyway, so there’s that.

My initial picture was without the purple border; I started adding a border to get a square image in Instagram, wondered if my usual “white” was best, ran into the purple, and ended up liking it more that way. It also re-emphasizes the symmetry and the centering, in my opinion.

52Frames – 2020-20 – Not What You See

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This week, the theme for 52Frames was “Not What You See”, with an extra-credit for “Levitation” (which I claimed).

I had learnt a little while ago how to do that sort of things, and it’s fairly straightforward, assuming you have a tripod and manage to take pictures with similar-enough light – take two pictures, one with your subject, one without, and play with GIMP layers and masks to remove all the supporting elements (here I’m sitting on a chair and my feet are on a stool in front of me because I’m not flexible enough to handle doing that with a single chair :P).

It does feel like degree 0 (okay, 0.5) of creativity – which is the mood I was in today, I’ll admit; however, I did submit, I did not break my streak, and I did post 2020-20!