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Canon EOS 70D, Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 IS II USM lens @ 168mm, 1/1000 second @ f/5.6, ISO 160.

This week, it’s back to black and white. And it’s one that I really don’t like: street photography. I just don’t get street photography, which is a rant for another time.

I went and stood on the corner, with no real idea what to shoot. I was thinking of maybe catching someone over the road smoking in their doorway, but they weren’t there. It was probably too early for them. Then I saw that I had some lines leading towards the fire training tower at the end of the street. I looked up, and then hurriedly snapped off some shots, trying to catch the plane and the man walking. I then hung around for a bit to see if I could improve on this, but I had no luck.

Hopefully street photography doesn’t come up again this year.

Canon EOS 70D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM lens, 2.5 seconds @ f/8, ISO 125.

This week, the photo challenge was to do a still life in the style of some Dutch masters. It’s the first challenge that I just haven’t really been bothered much with. It might be because I have so much else going on at the moment, but more likely, I just don’t care about still life (thankfully I missed the HDR week).

One of the styles is Ontbijtjes (“little breakfast”). So I thought I’d get a little breakfast and shoot it in the style. So here’s a little bit of Weet-bix, with some of Melissa’s little fruit Weet-bix hanging around. I put it on a nice serving dish we have, and made Melissa light it with a torch. The plate picked up some nice reflections.

Canon EOS 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM lens, 1/250 seconds @ f/2.8, ISO 100.

We’re back to portraits this week in the photo challenge, and this time we’re supposed to use bounced light.

Bouncing light is something I’m quite familiar with (at a basic level at least), so the real challenge was finding a subject. So when Susan and Kassie came around to help stuff tea bags, I jumped at my chance.

This was shot with an off-camera flash in a soft-box thing (it attaches to the flash head, the blue shop sells them) pointing at Kassie from the left of frame, and Melissa holding a reflector to bounce some of that light back onto the right side of Kassie’s face. I had her pose so the flash hit her at an angle, just because. A little bit of spot removal in Lightroom et voilà.

Canon EOS 7D Mark II, Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens, 1/250 second @ f/1.8, ISO 2000

This week for the photo challenge, we’re back to going outside, and we’ve been challenged to take a photo using the Brenizer method. This is basically take a grid panorama to fake the effect of a large format camera. In other words, a wide angle photo with heaps of bokeh.

Yesterday was Melissa’s 30th, and we went to Zealandia in the afternoon/evening (full album up on Dr yomcat shoots in due course). I had a new toy to play with, but I also took along a short lens so I could do this challenge. I made Melissa pose, and then took 38 frames around her. I stitched these together in Lightroom, then added a little content aware fill in Photoshop. I cropped it to a $4 \times 5$ and here it is. As a bonus, when you click on the image above, you can get the big-arse version (it’s $11463 \times 9170$ pixels, and around 20MB).

Canon EOS 70D, Canon EF-S 24mm f/2.8 STM lens, 1/100 seconds @ f/5.6, ISO 200

So we’ve come full circle with the photo challenge, as we’re back to black and white this week. The challenge for this week was entropy. The challenge writer was explicit in his removal of the physics definition, but made no mention of the information theory definition (a logarithmic measure of the rate of transfer of information in a particular message or language). Unfortunately, I couldn’t really think of a nice way to shoot this, and the generic definition just works better.

While working to work yesterday, I saw a crashed car (looked like it hit a powerpole or something) on the footpath outside the police station. But I didn’t have my camera with me, and I hadn’t really read the challenge at that point. Plus, when I got home, I realised it was the opposite of entropy — it was a sudden decline into disorder.

Then I remembered that we have this old wheelbarrow in the back lawn (it’s not ours, it was there when we moved in). There were a few challenges with this subject though, the main one being it’s not physically possible to move it (I tried, and the bottom fell out without much prompting). So I basically only had one angle from which to shoot it. In post, I moved the white point around a lot to emphasise the texture on the barrow (it’s actually a rather rusty red, not the bright colour shown here).