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”.
For “Crack”, I was very much in the “looking around to see if I can find something” mode. I was expecting to find it on a wall, but I found it on the floor – that’s a detail from a sidewalk. I liked the geometry of these, and the fact that there was one that was slightly larger than the others.
The initial shot is very, very close from what I submitted:
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
1/50 s
ISO
640
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Crack 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 “Macro” shot did not start well. I wanted to go for another word and hope for the best for other words of the list, so I took my camera, hopped on the bus, and went to my destination. I had the rest of the list in my mind, and I ran into something that COULD have worked for Macro. So I took the camera out of the bag, and I got a sinking feeling that got confirmed a few seconds later when I lit on the camera: no memory card ðŸ˜Â So I walked home feeling stupid, and grumbled a lot.
But, somehow, I managed to pick myself up an hour or two later, thinking “I am going to go back outside with the camera, and we’ll see what happens”. And, in the meantime, I had had a proper idea for the “macro” shot. Now, on the Fuji, I don’t have a macro lens (…… yet 😉). Hence, I went with a bit of a larger interpretation there – many people use “macro” as a synonym for “close-up”, and I decided it’d be good enough for me. Technically wrong, but socially acceptable, I guess 😉 I was consequently looking for something that was small enough to work as a close-up, and still be typical of Zürich. Switzerland has fresh water fountains EVERYWHERE. And the city of Zürich itself, apparently, has 1200 of them – so it felt like a nice idea to consider the mouth of such a fountain. I left the apartment (again…) with my camera, INCLUDING A MEMORY CARD, and a Lume cube because the daylight was starting to fade, and I did a small round of the three fountains in my vicinity I could think of (I found a fourth one since!) before I settled on this one.
The Lume cube got handy to give some texture to the water; I’m also quite happy with both the focus and depth of field of that image. As a “Macro” image, I’ll admit it’s a bit weak; but for me it still has a story behind it, and I’m happy about that.
That’s the original, out of the camera picture:
Camera
Fujifilm X-30 II
Lens
Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
Focal length
47 mm
F-Number
F/10
Exposure time
1/100s
ISO
800
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Macro album.
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Reflections” – as usual, it starts by “I’ll just take pictures of a couple of dice on a tablet”, and it ends with a full setup in the softbox with a couple of lights and a tripod.
Still, this does feel like a fairly low-effort / low-motivation / low-creativity shot – but, eh, it’s a shot.
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Rule of Thirds”. I admit this is not my favorite kind of theme, because it’s not restrictive enough, and it’s not really making my brain thrive with creativity. That said, the extra challenge (which I claimed) was for “1/2000s or faster” – for which flash-less drop photography works reasonably well. I setup three bright LED panels on top of a plate containing water colored in blue, I grabbed a remote and a small drip pipette, and started shooting. I had a few issues at the beginning getting the focus right – but I eventually prevailed by focusing manually on the place where the drop would fall, instead of “the line where I think it would and focusing on the border of the plate” (that didn’t work at all). That, in term, allowed me to open my aperture more, and to finally get enough light without having a super-grainy picture, in order to be actually able to claim the extra challenge.
I’ll have to try that sort of things with flashlights eventually 😉
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Unexplored”. It turns out that there’s a place in Zürich I always kind of wanted to visit but never dared to, because it felt awkward: the local cemetery in Sihlfeld. So I gathered a bit of courage along with my camera, and went there.
Well, it turns out that it’s a beautiful place, very quiet, with a lot of trees; and it… actually didn’t felt too awkward to take pictures there – even less so than in a regular park due to the distinct lack of crowds. I thoroughly enjoyed my stroll there; I was, however, somewhat nonplussed with the pictures I managed to take – which I feel don’t necessarily reflect well the mood of the place. But, now that the initial exploration is out of the way, I’ll probably go back with a better plan in mind 🙂
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Depth of Field”, with an extra credit (which I claimed) for “f1.4”. I have exactly one lens able to go up to 1.4, and that’s not its best aperture to say the least 😉 (the chromatic aberration is strong there.) But I was still adamant on claiming this extra credit, because I don’t shoot that wide open enough, and I thought it would make a nice training for me 🙂
I had seen on Instagram cloudsnug mentioning he was seeing the first crocuses in his garden – which made me take my camera on a trip to the Arboretum / Rentenwiese, where I had been delighted by early flowers last year. And indeed, there was snowdrops and purple crocuses, so I spent a bit of time trying to catch a reasonable low depth of field picture of them. It was also a good exercise in manual focus training! I will admit that I would have preferred working with either my 50mm macro (instead of my 50mm non-macro) or with my 100mm macro – but I still very much enjoyed the time I spent at the park.
The theme for this week’s 52Frames is “Black&White Photography”. I was around the Prime Tower this afternoon and took a few pictures. On this one, I accidentally experimented with lens flare too. I thought they looked kind of cool, so I explicitly made them pop more during the post-processing – in which I also tried to have nice window texture!
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Minimalism”. I was at the local athletic ground earlier today with my camera for Other Photographic Project Reasons, and I figured that the numbers on the track (pun intended) could be a nice “minimalist” shot. I took a few of these, at different places (there’s three or four such numberings for the corridors all along the track), and I ended up liking this one best. And then, when I started editing, I realized the track was definitely more worn out at the start than after that, which I thought made for a nice bit of story-telling.
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Complementary colors”. It turns out that I have a beautiful new house plant that has red and green leaves – so let’s go!
After trying to get a properly sharp picture by hand-holding the camera, as usual I gave up and got the tripod out, and even had to set up the electronic shutter on top of the remote because that thing is NOT stable when the camera is looking down – I have a tripod whose central column can be turned horizontal, but it’s very wiggly in that position. It took a bit of processing to get a clean black background, to remove a couple of sadder leaves, and to get rid of the (white) plant pot. But there, I have a shot 🙂
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Hello from…”, which is usually interpreted as “take a picture from around where you are this week”. I titled mine “Hello from… the fog!” – we had glorious fog yesterday evening, and I went for a short walk to clear my head fairly late in the evening. When I left home, I considered taking a camera with me, and decided against it: it felt like my phone and the gigantic amount of automatic processing would do a better work than I would trying to stabilize things in these kind of circumstances. I think it was the right call: I played around with and without the night mode, and I got a few cool shots, including this one – taken with the night mode.
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