Week 4: Companions
I found this to be a horrible topic. [/Self-Pity]
With that out of the way, I think this is one of the problems I have with photography. I'm narrow minded. "Companions" immediately made me think of our cats. But only because we haven't got a dog. I was also seriously considering slipping a picture of Morena Baccarin in the contact sheet to represent the Browncoat in me. [/Firefly-plug]. The dictionary wasn't much help either, and I have a shortage of Hobbits and Dwarves in the house to take pictures of proper Companions. Finally, after a lot of thinking, I came up with the idea of items that go well together. Knife & Fork, cup and saucer, etc etc. In the end, I decided on my three lenses.
In terms of companionship, I think my 14, 23 & 35mm Fuji primes are amazing. They're the perfect focal lengths for me, and I'm finally starting to see the world in terms of those three focal lengths which is improving my photography. How hard can it be to take an interesting photo of three lenses?
Week 4 Contact Sheet by
Harlequin565, on Flickr
The answer, is, for me, "really hard".
I have total brain block when it comes to arranging things. I'm never going to take up flower arranging that's for sure! My camera was the X-E1 with the 18-55 lens on it which I hardly ever use. For the last 3 shots I used my iPhone camera which is on the fritz. All the shots were blurry which was a shame, because I quite liked the three lenses, the X-E1 and my Oly Trip all together. Once I got all the shots into LR it was easy to delete the rubbish and I was left with just a couple of shots I liked. But even they were boring (to me) and I didn't bother dusting the lenses before shooting them so I had a billion dust bunnies to clone out in PP afterwards. Lesson learned: 5 minutes with a cloth saves you 15 tedious minutes in Photoshop and you end up with a clean lens at the end of it!
The 35mm doesn't have "35" on the side as the 14 & 23 do, so it didn't look right in my OCD head. All the "side on" shots therefore got binned. I over-PP'd just 2 photos on the end, and couldn't decide which one I hated the least. All in all, a good idea poorly executed.
Week 4: Companions by
Harlequin565, on Flickr
This is the least-worst shot of the week. The posterisation filter has been applied to cover up a lot of distraction on the background and tighten up the lettering. A better idea would probably been to have blur the background and mask out the effects on the lens glass. I actually quite like the colours in the image and the muted gloomy lighting. I'm going to have it as a desktop wallpaper for a week so that I actually get some use out of it.
Roll on week 5