Tag: scavenger hunt

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.

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 😭 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.

As for Hunt #32, there was, for this Scavenger Hunt, an “extra credit” for the people submitting all 10 pictures: presenting all the pictures on a single image – the exact formulation was “contact sheet”, but the constraints were “don’t overlap, don’t re-crop, don’t add borders; if the background is visible, black, white, or grey.

The first image I took was the one with the tin cans, and it has a fairly awkward size ratio, so I felt like I was in trouble. So, I planned.

I was super proud of myself: I had created an extra constraint for the pictures because for my rectangle to work, I needed precise ratios, but that was FINE, right? Right. Best plans of mice and men. For one thing, as you can see, there’s been a significant reshuffling of dimensions… and images! as I was getting the pictures 🙂

And then I put together the image, it was pretty bad. It became very apparent that I did need a neutral background to separate the pictures; the initial plan didn’t work at all. This was pretty disheartening, because the whole geometry worked well with these ratios, but adding borders to them wouldn’t work easily 😦 I considered re-cropping the images to make them work within the ratios, and gave up on the idea: it felt like re-editing the pictures to be able to add them to a “contact sheet”-type of image would kind of defeat the purpose. So, instead, I moved things around, I aligned images as I could, and I tried to get something as pleasantly looking as I could.

It means that the 3×2 images have far more grey space around them than I would have liked – but it ended up being the best I could do – otherwise I had more space in height, and that was worse. I was quite disappointed, to be honest – when I realized I had overlooked the space for the borders. But oh well, that’s how you learn. I still believe that trying to get the constraint first and shoot within these constraints was the right move – but I didn’t get the right constraints at the beginning 🙂

The complete Scavenger album is available here – along with its winners!: the Sheet album.

While I used the previous Hunt to experiment with composites and story-telling, I wanted to go “back to basics” for this Hunt, and try to get maybe closer from my comfort zone, but also closer to pictures that feel like “me”. But, for the personal challenge, I shot everything with my 100mm macro lens!

The “Backlight” theme was an occasion to experiment with something I wanted to do for quite some time, namely see-through photography that would enable to see greater details and colors – it’s a fairly common exercise in macro and food photography. For all its commonality, thought, finding a (written) tutorial on the matter proved difficult, if not impossible – so it was time for me to put the thinking hat on! We almost always have limes home for, err, mixology reasons, so my subject was pretty much a given (I did consider buying a kiwi – another popular fruit to photograph that way!)

It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize I didn’t have to prop my slice of lime vertically to photograph it. Instead, I came up with the following contraption, starring my faithful piece of black fabric, a makeshift light tripod holding a Lume cube with a funnel, two chairs holding a transparent dish (with the help of a little masking tape)… and the slice of lime.

Once the setup was done, it was mostly a matter of tuning the alignment of the light and the slice of lime, tune the exposure to avoid blowing whites, and taking a bunch of pictures to get one that was sharp.

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length	100 mm
F-Number	F/5.6
Exposure time	1/500
ISO	500

Editing required a bit of Photoshop to get better masks so that I could get rid of the distracting light leaks; if not for that, it would have been “crop + color correction + removing a few dots and dust”.

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

While I used the previous Hunt to experiment with composites and story-telling, I wanted to go “back to basics” for this Hunt, and try to get maybe closer from my comfort zone, but also closer to pictures that feel like “me”. But, for the personal challenge, I shot everything with my 100mm macro lens!

Pierre recently got a iFixIt tool kit that contains aaaaall the small tool bits, so I knew that this would be a prime candidate for “macro-like-shot-of-tools”. When I opened the box and saw all the tips well aligned, I knew I wouldn’t have to look much further indeed. I got multiple shots, playing with the light to get some highlights but avoid a completely flat picture, getting reasonable depth of field and sharpness, and this is what I landed on:

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length	100 mm
F-Number	F/32
Exposure time	1.6 s
ISO	640

One of the other shots I had had a tilt/slant to it, which I liked, so I rotated that image in post. I also wanted the black support foam to be darker, and the image to have warmer tones, so I did that.

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

While I used the previous Hunt to experiment with composites and story-telling, I wanted to go “back to basics” for this Hunt, and try to get maybe closer from my comfort zone, but also closer to pictures that feel like “me”. But, for the personal challenge, I shot everything with my 100mm macro lens!

When I was first brainstorming this Hunt, I was first considering going in the same direction as the previous Hunt with all the manikins. “Temptation” was one of the few words for which I had an immediate image in mind: that of a manikin posing in a suggestive position 🤣. But I decided against it, so you’ll have to take my word for it that it would have been awesome.

Instead, I took the opportunity of Pierre experimenting with chocolate (as it often happens in this house) and took some pictures of melting chocolate.

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length	100 mm
F-Number	F/4
Exposure time	1/15 s
ISO	1600

Chocolate is fiendishly hard to have proper colors for – I think I managed pretty well on this one. I’m not super happy with the picture in general, it could have done with more depth of field and more sharpness, which in turn would have meant more light, which in turn made things complicated. And at the time I realized it could have been better, that chocolate was more than melted! Later opportunities presented themselves, but I didn’t seize them – but oh well, it’s still a decent picture. It makes ME hungry, that’s all that matters!

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

While I used the previous Hunt to experiment with composites and story-telling, I wanted to go “back to basics” for this Hunt, and try to get maybe closer from my comfort zone, but also closer to pictures that feel like “me”. But, for the personal challenge, I shot everything with my 100mm macro lens!

My first idea for “Crooked” was to get an old piece of defunct electronics, find an integrated circuit on it, remove it, and re-add it with a pin out of place and crooked. That plan didn’t pan out because I forgot to take into account that electronics got _smol and I couldn’t find a proper candidate for my experience (also, things would have been cut short anyway, so I’m not sure how realistic that plan was in the first place.)

But this got me into my electronics boxes, where I found a bunch of brand new resistors cohabitating with the few that had been used already… and whose leads showed it. The setup was pretty minutious, to get a square picture where the resistors would be properly spaced on the whole picture; this is what I ended up with for the final shot.

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	1/200 s
ISO	400

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

While I used the previous Hunt to experiment with composites and story-telling, I wanted to go “back to basics” for this Hunt, and try to get maybe closer from my comfort zone, but also closer to pictures that feel like “me”. But, for the personal challenge, I shot everything with my 100mm macro lens!

I almost got stumped with my general “feel” for this round’s pictures for the word “Cow”. It’s a bit ironic, considering that Switzerland is, in all fairness, cow-land: I wouldn’t have to go far to go get cow pictures! But I wanted to evoke the cow without having an image that would be wildly out of place compared to the others. Hence, I rapidly zeroed on the idea of getting some cow-spot pattern fabric for this image. I was lucky enough to find a craft shop that had two different cow print fabrics, and was selling it by length of 30cm only; I ordered both and they arrived a couple of days later. (Be aware that I now own a tiny bit of two different cow print fabrics – they may come back 😀 ). I think I preferred the print on the other fabric, but the texture of this one was significantly better for my purpose, so that’s the one I ended up getting in my picture.

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	1/20 s
ISO	1250

You’ll notice that the “pre-edit” and “post-edit” pictures are eerily similar: this may be the least edits I’ve done on a Hunt picture of recent memory 🙂 (Well, except for the SOOC round, but that doesn’t really count!).

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