For the Scavenger Hunt #37, I revisited the theme I had used in Scavenger Hunt #32 – the wooden manikins are back!
For “Lost”, I went for the pretty straightforward narrative of “having lost one’s keys (or phone, or whatever else) between the cushions of the sofa”. So this was essentially posing the manikin, shooting, basic processing, and done.
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length
100mm
F-Number
F/8
Exposure time
1/80 s
ISO
800
The pictures from my fellow Scavengers are here: Lost.
For the Scavenger Hunt #37, I revisited the theme I had used in Scavenger Hunt #32 – the wooden manikins are back!
For the word “Empty”, I wanted a very minimalist image, with the idea of the manikin being in a completely empty room. I wasn’t exactly sure of how to achieve that because I lack a clean seamless white background of that size. But I got the idea of shooting from above on top of our (white) coffee table.
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
Pentax D FA 24-70mm F2.8
Focal length
70mm
F-Number
F/6.3
Exposure time
1/60 s
ISO
800
This gave me a manikin on a white background with a shadow below it (shadows are important to ground things on a surface, otherwise they’re floating!). I processed it by cropping the white content, increasing the canvas size to give more space to the image (and relying on software magic and a lot of cloning tools to make said canvas increase “realistic enough”), and making the whole image black&white to emphasize the minimalist approach.
The pictures from my fellow Scavengers are here: Empty.
I will admit: my participation to the 36th Scavenger Hunt was half-assed. I didn’t even submit the whole set – I was missing three; and some of these are, at best, backup shots. That said, I did submit images, and there are one or two that I’m actually happy with – so let’s go! In alphabetical order of submitted words, because why not. All the albums are available on the above link – visit them for more inspired creations around this list!
Bump
Tram tracks are definitely bumpy – not that much when driving a car (and even then…), but definitely so when using rollerblades, a scooter, a bike, or anything else. I may or may not have occasionally tripped on them when walking! The weather was very bright when I took this picture; I tried to compensate with a black&white processing and an abstract-ish composition. Feels pretty weak to me.
Door
Taken a few meters away from the tram track – again, not hugely inspired. Also, that tram was stopped in a photographically-annoying place, there’s a metallic pole on the right of the picture, and the crop as complicated.
Red/Green
For this one, we knew that our images would also be sent to a colorblindness simulation filter. I didn’t know exactly what to do with that information, but I still wanted something that would convey a red/green notion, even if all the colors disappeared. I played with multiple exposures around a trafic light; I wasn’t intending to have the blurred cars in the first place, but my experiments actually went there, and I didn’t hate it. I first took these images as a “proof of concept”, and I wantend to take some more with a bit more intent (… and a tripod), but that did not happen, so… that’s the picture.
Seated is the first picture I took and, for a long while, was the only one I’d submit this round. We went to Stoos at the very beginning of the Hunt, and we spent a significant amount of time going up and down the neighboring mountains in that kind of chair lifts! It was brilliant. This is my favorite picture for this round.
Sign
There was an extra field for the Sign picture to provide an alt text for the description of the image. I’ve been trying to do that systematically for quite some time – this way, I was ready! Here’s what I submitted for this one: “A tree stump with lichen and ivy, seen from the side, with a small metallic sign indicating that it was a Tilia platyphilla, or Sommerlinde (in German), of the Tiliaceae family, growing in Europa. A red brick building is visible in the background at the top of the image, where the tree used to be.”
I’m always sad when trees are felled, but I recognize that it is sometimes necessary. Keeping the sign plate and a fairly large stump felt like a good idea to me – as a kind of a memorial to the tree in question.
Silence
Picturing “Silence” is not easy – but I finally got the idea of using my noise cancelling headphones for that purpose. I hadn’t really planned my t-shirt choice, but it worked out perfectly, especially since Doctor Who has villains called the Silence! I went for a slightly high-key, slightly soft processing to emphasize the idea of calm (because silence is, well, good :P)
The 35th Scavenger Hunt had a very colorful theme, because there’s all colors of the rainbow in it, and then some. It took me a while to manage to find a way to get a set of pictures that would look like a proper set. My first idea was to try to do something around food photography; some of the colors dissuaded me. I finally landed on the idea of doing something I had wanted to do for a long time: playing with water and oil and soap to make BUBBLES. Not all the pictures have all these components, but I tried to keep a uniting “bubbles/droplets” theme while trying to provide some variation on the technique to get cohesive, but different images.
I had actually done a “rainbow-and-droplets” theme for a previous Hunt, which was sad, because now I needed a new idea. I had had some fun results with the pixels of my tablet on another picture recently, so I decided to lean into that for the Rainbow shot. I first created an image to display on said tablet:
I didn’t know where I was going exactly, so I gave myself options with a rainbow background and more rainbows. Incidentally, this taught me how to create my own gradients with multiple colors, so that was useful 🙂 This gave me something to display on my tablet. Then I played with a few variations of liquids and water, and finally settled on a window cleaner sprinkler full of water to sprinkle my screen with small droplets. Finally, took pictures, decided for a shot, edited the shot, and that’s the last shot for this Hunt!
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length
100 mm
F-Number
F/8
Exposure time
1/125
ISO
800
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Rainbow album.
The 35th Scavenger Hunt had a very colorful theme, because there’s all colors of the rainbow in it, and then some. It took me a while to manage to find a way to get a set of pictures that would look like a proper set. My first idea was to try to do something around food photography; some of the colors dissuaded me. I finally landed on the idea of doing something I had wanted to do for a long time: playing with water and oil and soap to make BUBBLES. Not all the pictures have all these components, but I tried to keep a uniting “bubbles/droplets” theme while trying to provide some variation on the technique to get cohesive, but different images.
For White, I went for bubbles, but not the oil-in-water kind. I recently bought a new coffee machine that also has a milk system; for this picture, I used that to get a white foam! I lit it from below, and my camera thought it was far more yellow than it actually was, but I still liked the bubble structure very much, so that’s what I ended up editing and submitting.
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length
100 mm
F-Number
F/7.1
Exposure time
1/100
ISO
100
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the White album.
The 35th Scavenger Hunt had a very colorful theme, because there’s all colors of the rainbow in it, and then some. It took me a while to manage to find a way to get a set of pictures that would look like a proper set. My first idea was to try to do something around food photography; some of the colors dissuaded me. I finally landed on the idea of doing something I had wanted to do for a long time: playing with water and oil and soap to make BUBBLES. Not all the pictures have all these components, but I tried to keep a uniting “bubbles/droplets” theme while trying to provide some variation on the technique to get cohesive, but different images.
For Black, I deviated a bit from my initial concept – I wanted to have drops of water on a black background. Turns out that getting clean drops of water does not work on any surface! And the best thing I got was… the screen of my tablet. I painstakingly added my drops of water one by one with a small pipette, and started taking some pictures. You may have seen another one of these in another post – I figured the images were different enough to submit to both 52Frames and the Hunt from the same set. I really liked this one – the reflection of the window at the bottom was a happy accident that gives more volume – they kind of look like they each have their own socle! And they kind of look like astronaut helmets too.
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length
100 mm
F-Number
F/10
Exposure time
1/50
ISO
800
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Black album.
The 35th Scavenger Hunt had a very colorful theme, because there’s all colors of the rainbow in it, and then some. It took me a while to manage to find a way to get a set of pictures that would look like a proper set. My first idea was to try to do something around food photography; some of the colors dissuaded me. I finally landed on the idea of doing something I had wanted to do for a long time: playing with water and oil and soap to make BUBBLES. Not all the pictures have all these components, but I tried to keep a uniting “bubbles/droplets” theme while trying to provide some variation on the technique to get cohesive, but different images.
Violet did not start well. It’s the last picture I shot (before the “bonus” picture), and I felt I was getting at the end of what I could achieve on my theme. And…. it turns out that it’s my favorite for this round. I started by searching ideas for violet things on Google, and saw “amethyst” very early on. And hey, amethyst is significantly overrepresented in my tiny rock collection! So I started playing with my amethyst in various containers, moving water back and forth and being generally tired. I remember snapping this one because the lines of bubbles was uncommon – I still have no idea how that one happened, I thought there was a hair, but there wasn’t. I think that at that time there was mostly water, and the oil was mostly leftovers from surfaces and not really added per se. When I came back to my computer, I was very happy with what I was seeing – and particularly the fact that it was indeed sharp enough to use. I love how this looks like a starry night and/or a nebula, and I’m incredibly happy with this picture. The original image gives a better idea of the amethyst at the bottom!
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length
100 mm
F-Number
F/8
Exposure time
1/125
ISO
800
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Violet album.
The 35th Scavenger Hunt had a very colorful theme, because there’s all colors of the rainbow in it, and then some. It took me a while to manage to find a way to get a set of pictures that would look like a proper set. My first idea was to try to do something around food photography; some of the colors dissuaded me. I finally landed on the idea of doing something I had wanted to do for a long time: playing with water and oil and soap to make BUBBLES. Not all the pictures have all these components, but I tried to keep a uniting “bubbles/droplets” theme while trying to provide some variation on the technique to get cohesive, but different images.
Coming up with Indigo took me a long while, mostly because I’m not even entirely sure how to DEFINE indigo (And, apparently, I’m not the only one: Indigo#Classification as a spectral color.) The color definition seems to vary between “dark blue” and “blue with purplish hues”, and then whatever is dyed with indigo dye can also end up in various shades of blue. I’m pretty sure this is a word I never use spontaneously when talking about colors. I did want to go vaguely in the direction of “between dark blue and purple”, but I also didn’t want to do something that would be confused for purple. All in all, this means that the “indigo” picture was one that I left for the end of this Hunt.
It also meant that I needed to find something in the correct hue for the pictures, and that was not obvious either. I finally noticed that our dinner trays are somewhat in the blue/purple/indigo shades, and that’s what I ended up using as a background. I used significantly more dish soap for this image than for the others, so the bubbles are very distinct; the sadder point is that there’s a few spots of larger visibly soapy bubbles, and I would have preferred the picture without them, I think. I still very much liked the effect, especially around the white border, that seem to give a lot of depth to the bubble; this made me keep more of the white background in the final image than I was initially planning to.
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length
100 mm
F-Number
F/4.5
Exposure time
1/200
ISO
800
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Indigo album.
The 35th Scavenger Hunt had a very colorful theme, because there’s all colors of the rainbow in it, and then some. It took me a while to manage to find a way to get a set of pictures that would look like a proper set. My first idea was to try to do something around food photography; some of the colors dissuaded me. I finally landed on the idea of doing something I had wanted to do for a long time: playing with water and oil and soap to make BUBBLES. Not all the pictures have all these components, but I tried to keep a uniting “bubbles/droplets” theme while trying to provide some variation on the technique to get cohesive, but different images.
“Blue” is the second image I shot for this set. I wanted a bit of texture, so I shot on top of blue, soft blanket. There’s not much water in this picture, because I wanted the blue texture to come forward; I had to shepherd the oil/soap bubbles together to get some structure. I’m very happy wit the shadows on this image – Lume cube to the rescue! When I first opened these, I fell for the top-left shadow globules, which I found so very cute. I picked the sharpest image I had in that set, and worked on it until I got the final version.
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length
100 mm
F-Number
F/10
Exposure time
1/125
ISO
250
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Blue album.
The 35th Scavenger Hunt had a very colorful theme, because there’s all colors of the rainbow in it, and then some. It took me a while to manage to find a way to get a set of pictures that would look like a proper set. My first idea was to try to do something around food photography; some of the colors dissuaded me. I finally landed on the idea of doing something I had wanted to do for a long time: playing with water and oil and soap to make BUBBLES. Not all the pictures have all these components, but I tried to keep a uniting “bubbles/droplets” theme while trying to provide some variation on the technique to get cohesive, but different images.
The “Green” image is one of my favorites for this set. I wanted to experiment with a background that would be recognizable, but that wouldn’t detract from my “abstract” theme. I went for a small walk gathering plane tree and poplar tree leaves, trying to find the most green and vibrant ones I could. I set them up in layers on the table, and put my usual mix of water and oil. For this one, I also wanted the larger bubble to be “softer”, so I didn’t add any dish soap to that picture. The water bowl was also pretty shallow, because I did want the leaves to be recognizable.
I wasn’t convinced I’d get anything until I opened this one, and exclaimed “THERE! THAT’S the look that I want!”. A bit of cropping and processing later, and tada, green was done!
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length
100 mm
F-Number
F/7.1
Exposure time
1/80s
ISO
800
The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Green album.
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