Tag: Photography

My goal with Hunt 34 was to do something closer to a “real” Scavenger Hunt and to take all my shots outside in the city. I have a mix of “found shots” and “places I know where I’ll be able to take a shot” for this round, and that felt pretty good. I also have a new, more compact camera than my Pentax “monster” – so I also wanted the opportunity to shoot with it more and get more comfortable with it: my other goal for this Hunt was “everything shot with the Fuji”.

My picture for “Music” is a mix of “found shots” and “I know where I’m getting that shot”. The Musik Hug shop was very much in my mind when I took my camera on a walk to get some shots; it also has a room with many Steinway pianos that I was hoping to capture. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a polarizing filter on that lens yet at that time, making my initial plan fail.

But I still turned around the building, and their collection of displayed vinyls caught my eye, mostly because it has one of my favorite albums on display! (Yes, that’s be the Queen one 😉 ). And when I realized that the St.-Peter church (and Europe’s largest church clock face!) was visible in the reflection… well, if you can’t beat’em join’em – it actually made me happy to get a better picture for my overarching “Zürich” theme than I would have gotten if I had gone with my first idea – it’s actually one of my favorite pictures for this round :). Here’s the initial picture:

Camera	Fujifilm X-30 II
Lens	Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length	18 mm
F-Number	F/3.6
Exposure time	1/60s
ISO	2000

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Music album.

My goal with Hunt 34 was to do something closer to a “real” Scavenger Hunt and to take all my shots outside in the city. I have a mix of “found shots” and “places I know where I’ll be able to take a shot” for this round, and that felt pretty good. I also have a new, more compact camera than my Pentax “monster” – so I also wanted the opportunity to shoot with it more and get more comfortable with it: my other goal for this Hunt was “everything shot with the Fuji”.

I expected to be in a bit of trouble with “Lemon” – should I bring a random lemon to a location? Or try to find a restaurant with “Lemon” in its name and go from there? (I knew at least some places with “Lemongrass” in the name.) So I actually searched on Google Maps for, well, “lemon”. And there’s a shop called “Blue Lemon” on one of the iconic squares of Zürich, Paradeplatz. I felt a bit self-conscious taking pictures in that place – lots of people, and feeling a bit weird about taking pictures of that shop! I finally landed on the following picture. Since I wanted the theme to be obvious and not hidden somewhere in the image, I went for the selective coloring of the lemon in post. And since I like Easter eggs, I also re-saturated te blue to get the faint blue at the bottom of the tram too 😉

Camera	Fujifilm X-30 II
Lens	Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length	18mm
F-Number	F/13
Exposure time	1/40s
ISO	2000

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Lemon album.

My goal with Hunt 34 was to do something closer to a “real” Scavenger Hunt and to take all my shots outside in the city. I have a mix of “found shots” and “places I know where I’ll be able to take a shot” for this round, and that felt pretty good. I also have a new, more compact camera than my Pentax “monster” – so I also wanted the opportunity to shoot with it more and get more comfortable with it: my other goal for this Hunt was “everything shot with the Fuji”.

I think “Juxtaposition” was not a shot that I had planned before I left the apartment, but it came to me when I arrived in the vicinity of the Landesmuseum – I remembered that there was some controversy about the extension of the museum, at least partly because it was supposed to be a building contrasting greatly with the older, end-of-19th century building. Remembering that, I wondered if there was a way to maybe show both in the picture – and it turns out that, probably by design, there was! I took a short walk around the place and took a number of pictures; this one ended up being my favorite. I also like the presence of the tree – which would be better if I had taken that picture in the summer and not in the dread of winter, probably! – to add a second element of juxtaposition.

Camera	Fujifilm X-30 II
Lens	Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length	18 mm
F-Number	F/10
Exposure time	1/60s
ISO	1250

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Juxtaposition album.

My goal with Hunt 34 was to do something closer to a “real” Scavenger Hunt and to take all my shots outside in the city. I have a mix of “found shots” and “places I know where I’ll be able to take a shot” for this round, and that felt pretty good. I also have a new, more compact camera than my Pentax “monster” – so I also wanted the opportunity to shoot with it more and get more comfortable with it: my other goal for this Hunt was “everything shot with the Fuji”.

“Paint” was one of these “found shots”. I knew there was multiple places in Zürich with painted façades, so I wasn’t too worried about finding which. It turns out that this mural is on the façade of the Schweizer Heimwerk, a shop that sells “Swiss stuff”, and it seemed like a good idea for my overarching theme. I framed it with the windows, the pipe on the left and the stairs/catwalk in the bottom to give a better sense of location.

Since then, I also looked into the origin of this painting. It was painted in 1939 by Wilhelm Hartung, who also painted numerous other façades in the city (including one very close to my apartment!), and I apparently have a Wikipedia page to translate to French and English 😉

Here’s the original picture I took, from the other side of the Limmat:

Camera	Fujifilm X-30 II
Lens	Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length	88 mm
F-Number	F/6.4
Exposure time	1/100 s
ISO	250

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Paint album.

My goal with Hunt 34 was to do something closer to a “real” Scavenger Hunt and to take all my shots outside in the city. I have a mix of “found shots” and “places I know where I’ll be able to take a shot” for this round, and that felt pretty good. I also have a new, more compact camera than my Pentax “monster” – so I also wanted the opportunity to shoot with it more and get more comfortable with it: my other goal for this Hunt was “everything shot with the Fuji”.

I had another word in mind when I shot around that place, but I still think this works for “Chaotic” – at least when it comes to the chaotic nature of fluid dynamics 😉 This is a reflection of building along the Limmat. I don’t remember the exact timing of this picture, but I remember spending some time chasing reflections, and being very happy when a police motorboat started adding perturbation to the mix. Retrospectively, I kind of regret not cropping that shot in a way that would make it more abstract as it is there, but I think it fits the “Zürich” theme better that way.

Camera	Fujifilm X-30 II
Lens	Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length	56 mm
F-Number	F/9
Exposure time	1/60 s
ISO	800

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Chaotic album.

My goal with Hunt 34 was to do something closer to a “real” Scavenger Hunt and to take all my shots outside in the city. I have a mix of “found shots” and “places I know where I’ll be able to take a shot” for this round, and that felt pretty good. I also have a new, more compact camera than my Pentax “monster” – so I also wanted the opportunity to shoot with it more and get more comfortable with it: my other goal for this Hunt was “everything shot with the Fuji”.

The “Glass” shot was very much a “I know what I’m going for” type of shot: “Zürich + Glass = Prime Tower”. So I went to the Prime Tower, and spent an hour or so turning around it and taking pictures from all possible angles, with and without polarizer (this one is probably “with”). I finally opted for a fairly typical view of the tower, but I’m happy with the texture of the windows and I think that it’s a good shot – although I regret cropping it that tight on the top edge. Live and learn. There’s not much between the out-of-the-camera shot (below) and my final image:

Camera	Fujifilm X-30 II
Lens	Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length	mm
F-Number	F/13
Exposure time	1/80s
ISO	800

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Glass album.

My goal with Hunt 34 was to do something closer to a “real” Scavenger Hunt and to take all my shots outside in the city. I have a mix of “found shots” and “places I know where I’ll be able to take a shot” for this round, and that felt pretty good. I also have a new, more compact camera than my Pentax “monster” – so I also wanted the opportunity to shoot with it more and get more comfortable with it: my other goal for this Hunt was “everything shot with the Fuji”.

“Texture” was definitely in that second category of “I know where I’m getting that” of shots. Well, first I had to come up with the idea (and what better idea than “chocolate” to represent Zürich as a texture?), but once I had it, I knew… because I made a similar shot five years ago:

These pictures are taken at Teuscher, which has a spectacular display – and that I hadn’t tasted yet. Well, I took the pictures on a Saturday instead of a Sunday for the first one, so this time I actually pushed their door to get a small of truffles, got out with a large box of truffles, a little one and a bag of salted butter caramels – oooops. Totally worth it, though, everything was delicious. I see why they are well-regarded as one of the best addresses in Zürich, Switzerland and the world.

Photography-wise, since I knew what I wanted to do, I also knew I needed a polarizing filter – so that’s my first post-Fuji-buy equipment investment, because OF COURSE I have 3 or 4 polarizing filters already but the Fuji lens’ diameter is not compatible.

Since I wanted “texture”, it kind of meant trying to have as little distractions as possible on the image – in particular avoiding the display shelf line of the pictures 5 years ago. I didn’t take as many shots as I would have liked because it was Saturday an the shop was open and I felt self-conscious, but I still managed to get something I could work with:

Camera	Fujifilm X-30 II
Lens	Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length	56 mm
F-Number	F/6.4
Exposure time	1/25s
ISO	800

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Texture album.

My goal with Hunt 34 was to do something closer to a “real” Scavenger Hunt and to take all my shots outside in the city. I have a mix of “found shots” and “places I know where I’ll be able to take a shot” for this round, and that felt pretty good. I also have a new, more compact camera than my Pentax “monster” – so I also wanted the opportunity to shoot with it more and get more comfortable with it: my other goal for this Hunt was “everything shot with the Fuji”.

“Bridge” was pretty much a given for a “main view” of the city that would come in play for the final “collect your images” picture – I wanted to go for a postcard type of views. I waited for a tram to drive by – because you can’t have a proper view of Zürich without a tram – and took a few pictures. Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t as clear as I would have hoped over the Alps in the background. Even more unfortunately, the weather was much better the next week, I was in that area… and I didn’t think of re-shooting that picture!

Anyway – that’s the original image – it has bluer tones, it’s somewhat crooked, and the background is less visible; those were the main edits on that picture.

Camera	Fujifilm X-30 II
Lens	Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length	18 mm
F-Number	F/6.4
Exposure time	1/100 s
ISO	160

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Bridge album.