In November, we spent a few days in Bourgogne, around Dijon and Beaune. I finally processed a few pictures, so here they are.
First, a few pictures around Dijon.
We also walked in the vineyards around Beaune.
And visited the Hospices.
And for the whole gallery of pictures, it’s over there: Bourgogne 2018-11.
The theme for 52Frames last week was “Hello from…”. And it so happened that we’ve had very good weather – to the point that I said “YESS” when arriving on top of Lindenhof and seeing the Alps in the background. I wanted to go for a very “classical” shot of the city, and the one from Lindenhof is my favorite, because you see Grossmünster very well (and, on that day, it had flags!), there’s a tram line on the road, and on clear days you see the Alps.
So I did that, I took the opportunity to take a few more shots – mostly with a crystal ball – and all in all it was a great afternoon in my favorite city – in which I happen to live 🙂
For Christmas, I got a crystal ball to use for photography. On Tuesday, the weather was nice, so I went in the city to experiment a bit with it.
First, I went to Lindenhof to get a re-take on my favorite view of the city.
The other side of that view is cool too:
Then I accidentally left my polarizing filter on – but that’s actually pretty cool, look, I’m holding a soap bubble!
And actually, photographing trees through that ball is pretty fun. But hey – I do have a favorite tree in Zürich! What if I visited it? A short tram ride later, here I am – Zürichhorn!
After a few more shots in the vicinity, I found another cool tree when walking back along the lake.
As I walked back to Bellevue, the night fell. Time to take a last one – I did not intend for the whole thing to be out of focus, but I happen to really like the end result 🙂
I took a few more pictures that day (including a heron silhouette!) – they are here: A small walk in Zürich with a crystal ball.
The theme for the second week of the 52Frames project was “Rule of Thirds“. I’ll admit my motivation for this theme was not very high – I considered going the “cheeky” route and take a picture of a third of a pie, but eh. And since it’s the second week, NOT submitting is inconceivable 😉
I knew motivation was going to be low, so when I went for lunch on Thursday and ran into that very pretty snowy tree, I took a bit of time to frame it within the constraints of said rule of thirds with my phone camera, thinking I’d have a backup shot in all cases.
I spent a bit of time doing some post-processing – cleaning up a few spots, removing a piece of road that was a bit ugly, and generally speaking bending the reality a little bit to get a better picture. Re-considering it right now, I’m thinking that maybe I should have removed more snow in the middle and compressed a bit the distances more – so that I would have better “horizontal” thirds.
I can’t say I’m particularly proud of that one – I do find it quite boring; but it’s submitted, it’s within the constraints of the challenge, and that’s all that matters!
The first assignment of the year for the 52Frames project was, as it is traditional, “Self-Portrait“. I got a crystal ball for Christmas that I needed to take for a first spin, so that’s what I did.
I did want to have a fairly neutral background – which is pretty hard when you do have a crystal ball that gives you a huge field of view – so I ended up taking pictures on the floor, below my camera set on my beloved tripod that can rotate the central column 90°. Even there, I’m a bit annoyed at the reflection from the window – but oh well. (I tried to post-process them away and failed miserably :P)
I played quite a bit with different ways of getting a proper focus – increasing the f-stop to get more “probability of being in focus”, trying to let the camera do its thing with autofocus and pray for the best, setting the camera at “this seems like a pretty good distance” manually and moving the ball up and down, taking multiple pictures as I went… In the end, the one I eventually chose was one of the earlier in the set. I like the hand position, and I also like the curl of hair that happened to go behind it.
The conclusion of that whole setup was that focusing on a crystal ball is not necessarily trivial, and it’s so much worse when trying to do it blindly while controlling the shutter with a remote 😉
Also worth mentioning: my t-shirt is the t-shirt for Slingshot by Tobias Klausmann, and if you haven’t read it yet you should 😉
One of the good things that came from Google+ is the Photography Scavenger Hunt, originally organized by Chrysta Rae, and since then taken over by Lauri Novak.
A few times a year, there’s a “call to Scavengers” – people subscribe to the Hunt (there’s a limited number of spots; in practice I don’t think the Hunt has been full in the past few editions at least), a list of 7 words is provided, and everyone has a few weeks to shoot and submit pictures that correspond to each word (one picture per word).
The 24th Scavenger Hunt was the seventh in which I took part – all of my previous entries are on my SmugMug profile.
For this edition, since I want to get more content on my blog, well, that’s exactly what I am doing by presenting my entries along with a few words of explanation 🙂
Continue reading “24th Photography Scavenger Hunt” →
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