Tag: Photography

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!).

52Frames – 2019 Week 07 – City at Night

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The theme for 52Frames this week was “City by Night” with an extra credit “5 seconds or longer”. So I took my tripod outside of the apartment for the first time – which made me conclude that, although I do love my Manfrotto for studio work, I definitely need a more portable tripod if I want to move around with it.

I started my walk at Lindenhof to get a view of the Limmat, the University and ETH.

I also got a picture of a rare ghost tram!

On the other side, Grossmünster and the colorful lights from the Kantonspolizei building.

Then, I strolled along the Limmat, taking the picture that’s on top of this post (and that I submitted for 52Frames), as well as this more accidental one (I probably shot in the tripod in the middle of the exposure, although I don’t remember it…), that I ended up liking quite a lot 🙂

I ended my stroll at the lake, looked at the pier…

… as well at the other side of the view in direction of the Opera.

I believe that, for a first try at tripod night photography, it was pretty good. The pictures I got are not very original, but they’re from a technical point of view not bad, and I’m even happy with them 🙂

All of these were exposed at 30 seconds on ISO 100 and with a f/stop that would allow me to get a reasonable exposure (f/13, f/14 for these ones, although I experimented a bit more than that). Hardware-wise, my Pentax K-1, mounted with my 24-70/2.8, my Manfrotto 055 tripod with a ball head. I had a neutral density filter in my backpack because I didn’t know what would be the conditions for “long exposures” (which I wanted), but I didn’t need it. Oh, and a cable release – I wouldn’t have expected to use the remote and the cable release as much as I do when I bought them 🙂

The full album (which I posted in its entirety here) is available here: Zürich by Night – February 2019.

52Frames – 2019 Week 06 – Your Desk!

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The theme for last week’s 52Frames was “Your Desk!“.

My first idea for the theme was to go for a very literal interpretation of the theme – I have made pictures of my desk in the past, mostly as “before/after” from my usual messy desk to a desk that stays way too ephemerally clean.

Instead, I used my new-ish journaling habit as a source of photographic inspiration: that’s my journal, my color pencils to color “trackers”, my pens to actually write things (I’m a bit in love with the Sign on the right, although it’s maybe a bit thick for my page size), and some brush pens for titles and decoration.

My goal there was to get as close as possible to “that picture makes my brain tingle in a nice way”: turns out, it’s incredibly difficult to achieve perfectly with round pens that tend to roll >_< Maybe I should have called some blu-tack to the rescue.

It must be said that the previous version of this picture was less brain-tingly: the pencils and brush pens were not in the same color order, and the crop was less satisfying. The friend to whom I had shown the first version of the picture noticed the color discrepancy (which was due to a re-ordering of pens according to numbers but not aligning the pencils order :P), so I re-shot and decided for another crop.

Also, I got to use my tripod in horizontal mode, which is always fun 😛

(And yes, the attentive reader will have noticed that this is indeed my gaming table and not my desk. Does that mean I cheated? I think I’m fine 🙂 )

52frames – 2019 Week 05 – Dirty

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Now 52Frames had a pretty tough theme – “Dirty“… I had a few ideas before this one, but I ended up liking the idea of the running mascara (which actually never happened to me, because… I rarely wear mascara :P)

I started experimenting in front of the mirror by putting some mascara on and dropping some water from above my eye. I actually got a half-decent result, realized I hadn’t set up my equipment yet (oops), ended up setting up a tripod (including screwing the fast release plate on the camera) with one eye closed because it was stinging a bit by then…

I repeated the “mascara + water” operation a few times and took a fair amount of shots before I decided for that one – I’m not necessarily super-happy with the mascara run itself there, but I liked it better than the others when it came to expression and sharpness.

Post-processing was mainly cropping, de-saturating a bit and playing with various cursors here and there 😛

Chemins de fer du Kaeserberg

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A week ago, we went to Fribourg, and more precisely to Granges-Paccot, to visit the Chemins de fer du Kaeserberg – a very impressive model railway exhibition.

The visit starts with a short movie that explains the origins of the project and gives a bit of technical background. I was fascinated by the work on the dioramas… and by the existence of a railroad-cleaning train 🙂

After the movie, we arrive in front of the first “station” that stores the trains that can travel on the rail network on that day – they say that they have 87 trains that are ready to travel.

The trains travel to the “main” circuit a couple of meters above via an helicoidal ramp, that is unfortunately not visible from the outside. There’s a hidden station to buffer trains before they actually arrive in the publicly visible area.

There are three networks in the model, all at 1:87 scale, but with two different track widths (H0 and H0m), corresponding to “standard” gauge and “narrow/metre” gauge.

Every half hour, night falls, giving a whole other atmosphere to the model.

They’re still working on a second line for the Kaeserberg train – it’s pretty neat to see the work in progress!

And finally, obviously, a Pierre for scale:

The full album with a few more pictures is here: Chemins de fer du Kaeserberg.

If you enjoy model trains and/or geeky stuff in general, I can highly recommend the visit. But beware: I found myself becoming far more enthusiastic about model trains after the visit than before 😉 Also, they have specific opening days, and it’s advised to make reservations for the tour.

52Frames – 2019 Week 04 – Macro

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The theme for 52Frames last week was “Macro” with an extra credit “Focus stacking”. I’ve been wanting to experiment with focus stacking for a while, so this was a good opportunity 🙂

I also knew I wanted to go for a somewhat “technical” shot – since I was experimenting with new post-processing, I wanted to make my life as easy as possible. But still – it took me a while to decide what interesting subject I could use, until my husband pointed out my hatching dragon figurine 🙂

I first did a round of a dozen pictures or so with my 50mm, ended up missing some focus points in some places, and with pictures that didn’t align well automatically (I’m suspecting that my 50mm lens’ focale is moving quite a lot when focusing). But at least it allowed me to set things up in a satisfying way, including using board game boxes to fiddle with the height of my pile 😉

I finally took a bunch (28, I believe) with my telephoto lens, which happens to have a macro setting. The “macro” thing may be pushing it a little, because the magnification factor is smaller than 1:1 (actually, the lens spec says 0.5 max magnification, sooo…), but oh well, I have a large sensor, I’m allowed large macros 😛

I first tried fiddling with Hugin and Enfuse, but I didn’t manage to make it work (I’ll try that again at some point, probably), and I finally dumped the whole thing into ZereneStacker, which gave me the above result with minimal fiddling (okay, fine, I did a bit of re-retouching of the image after the fact).

I hesitated on the crop – I did consider a tighter crop on one of the heads, for instance, but I decided that I quite liked the full figurine as it was. Also, this way, it doesn’t show as much how much this figurine needs dusting 😛