Tag: scavenger hunt

The “Wheel” topic was not particularly inspiring to me. I thought about a color wheel (an idea I had played with for the Paper Abstract theme and I didn’t feel like trying again), a Ferris wheel (that’s not much of a thing right now), doing cartwheels (I have no idea who I could ask to model that – for sure I can’t self-portrait there)…

I passed by a bike shed on a walk, so I snagged a few shots. It was almost empty: it was the shed of the local mall, on a Sunday, at a time where nothing was supposed to be opened (and yet for some reason Starbucks was… no idea how.) I still felt somewhat self-conscious taking pictures of what I knew was a fairly uninspiring subject, and taking them in an uninspiring way too! But hey, I got a shot, so there’s that.

The edit was straightforward: a bit of crop, exposure correction, I went for a warmer/yellower coloring because it felt better; I also removed the pedal on the right that felt distracting (after pondering if it could make sense to not have it there 🙂 ). And bam, an uninspiring, but very much in theme, picture for Wheel.

And for the images of my fellow Scavengers: the Wheel album.

The word “Count” of the 30th Scavenger Hunt list was, I think, the first one where I knew where I wanted to go – and obviously I went to Count Dracula. I usually pose for my portrait work, but for that one I definitely wanted a male model – and my husband gracefully accepted to pose for me 😉

This probably felt more like a theater endeavour than a photography one! We got him in a shirt (mandatory), I fought with cufflinks (cufflinks make no sense), we poured some cherry juice (“surprisingly not wine”) into a somewhat-chalice-looking beer glass (Kasteel, if you’re wondering), and I recycled the piece of fabric I use whenever I need a portable black background into a cape thanks to a safety pin. A bit of fiddling with the lights (I think this ended up being a white light top right and a Lume cube with a red filter bottom left), and voilà, we have a decent base for Dracula!

Processing involved the standard light, color and crop adjustment, as well as adding pointy teeth – who would believe in a toothless Dracula? I also fixed the “cape” because my black fabric doesn’t have a proper hem and is quite fringey 😉 All in all, I’m very happy with the result – it was also the first time I tried to “direct a model” – “Show me more teeth!” 🙂

And, for the pictures of my Scavenger fellows: the Count album!

The second word that gets revealed for the 30th Scavenger Hunt is “Hope”. The publication of the list happened roughly at a time where vaccines started being a thing that we were seeing as “folks: this is happening!” and my first idea was to try to play on that. And, I don’t know, I didn’t manage to find something that would work as a concept beyond that initial idea of “hrm, vaccines…” and I kind of gave up on it.

And then I went for a camera walk, and I stumbled on this.

It doesn’t look like much, but… I don’t know. Seeing that branch of ivy climbing along that tree, seemingly against the odds… it moved me. The issue, however, is that it was pretty tough to both get the context of that place and to highlight what I wanted to show – because it’s actually a fairly busy scene! So I resorted to some light and saturation work to emphasize what I wanted to show.

In all fairness, I’m not very happy with the final image, because it doesn’t really match what I wanted to convey. On the other hand, given the scene, I also don’t know what I could have done better – and maybe what I saw could not really be captured on my sensor. Still: I like that ivy growing on that tree.

And for all the pictures of my Scavenger folks: the Hope album.

The reveals for the 30th Scavenger Hunt start with the “Positive Space” album. “Negative space”, as a photography or composition tool, is a well-known concept. “Positive space” definitely got my brain gears stuck for the first few days/weeks that we had the list for this round. My initial train of thought was to go in the direction of a “filling the frame” picture; or to go in a completely different direction with a space that would happen to be positive (but no idea how to convey that properly).

And then we went for a walk with my husband, and we sat on a bench, and when I looked above me, I saw… that.

And it felt like such a good fit for the theme that I took a couple of pictures with my phone, and I kind of knew that I would submit the picture. It felt like it was the precise meaning I wanted to convey with this word, without being able to put my finger on it – but seeing the image, it got better. And while I’d define negative space as “the interesting shape of the space left by an object”, I’ll put “the interesting shape of the space taken by an object” as “my” definition for positive space – and that’s exactly what this picture is for me.

The processing was pretty straightforward – I didn’t even have to crop much, and it was mostly a matter of making things more contrasted/striking (hence the choice of B&W).

For all the interpretations of the word from my fellow Scavengers: Positive Space album.

I’m lucky enough to live near a lake that sees a fair amount of boat traffic, so I was not too worried about the Boats theme – I knew it wouldn’t be the most original shot, but I knew I could probably get a decent shot at least. I went on a walk during the Hunt time specifically to get a few shots that I knew I could get along the way. I ended up walking more than I thought I would, but it was a very pleasant walk, so win-win.

I ended up with A Lot of candidates for my Boats shot. For the SOOC constraint, I liked this one best: it’s colorful, there’s a nice reflection, the framing is… reasonable – although I don’t like that I see a bit of the nearby Badi on the top-left corner, and I think cropping would have helped getting the shot I wanted.

If not for the SOOC constraint, I probably would have tried to get a “cropable” image of this one with a shorter focal length and hoped for the best. As it is, it is still one of my favorite shots in the multiple that I have for this theme; I would either have gone back to get a better framing or more probably gone for a tighter crop in post, and probably been somewhat unsatisfied with the shot in general 😀

And the Scavenger album is here: Boats.

Metal is an instance of a picture that’s somewhat weak on the theme, but that I couldn’t resist including in my Hunt set because I loved it so much. I’m not even sure WHY I love it so much – but when I reviewed the set for that day, there was definitely an audible “oh!”.

The annoying thing is that I had a FANTASTIC find for the theme, but none of the pictures were remotely as good, at least in SOOC. There’s a botanical collection of succulent plants in Zürich, and this picture was taken behind that building. And a few meters away, there’s a bunch of metallic cactus sculptures. I spent a significant amount of time trying to get a good shot of these – but they’re stuck in an awkard place not far from a fairly busy road, so I didn’t manage to make a SOOC image work 😦 Not to mention that it was a very bright day and that there was literally no shade around at all, which didn’t help either.

If not for the SOOC constraint, I may have submitted this one:

I think it’s a better fit, but the non-edited version felt fairly bland. I also think that I may have shot differently without the SOOC constraint: I would have trusted that I could crop and turn things around, and I would probably have gotten larger angle shots with the hope of getting SOMETHING that I could use. I might go back to that place at some point, because these were fun to photograph!

And, for more pictures of the same word, the Scavenger album: Metal.

Path is probably one of the pictures I like less for this Hunt. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s a bad picture, but it’s somewhat uninspired and bland. This is a path near the river not far for my place, and it’s actually fairly rare to manage to catch it that empty: there’s usually a large amount of pedestrians and bikes trying to share it with or without grumbling 🙂

That’s mostly the reason why the framing is slightly “offset” compared to what I’d try to usually do (I think) – I didn’t want to be in the way, so I settled on the side on the path and started shooting. I took a fair amount of pictures, trying different combinations of depth of field and focus; I ended up liking the ones with the smallest aperture best, because the tree in the foreground was sharper and it felt better to not focus explicitly on said tree, so, there.

With the SOOC constraint, my major difficulty was to manage both framing and a picture that’s not crooked; I had pictures that I liked better in my set but that would have required some editing, so they were out by definition.

If not for the SOOC constraint, I might have gone for this:

This one is actually a composite. The person is in another picture – for which the whole picture was softer and the framinig was meh-er, but I really liked the idea of having someone there; and I also liked that the person was looking at the water (that I know to be behind the trees 🙂 ) and not simply walking. It was a no-no as it was, but comp’d with the one I submitted, it would have made it better 🙂

(Hi, my name is Balise and I’m compositing pictures for “what ifs” in a SOOC challenge 😀 )

And for the album of my fellow Scavenger fellows, follow the Path 🙂

With the list of words that we had for this round, the idea of a broken egg took place in my mind and never moved away from it. So I broke an egg on a reasonable surface, and I started shooting. I had started shooting hand-held, but after a few shots it became obvious that I wanted more depth of field than I could shoot handheld (and not compensate for in post), so I sighed, got the tripod out, and continued shooting.

Nothing much to say about this shot – it’s was basically a matter of “taking a lot of them and choose the best one”. If I remember correctly I did add a lume cube (or maybe a led panel? I’m not sure anymore!) as a secondary source of light, but that was pretty much it.

I would have gone for the same base picture if not for the SOOC constraint, but I would have edited a bit to remove the reflection in the back (which I find distracting) and boost a bit the reflection of the egg shell.

And the Scavenger album: Broken.