NickDs TP52 for 2021 - Week 52 - Showcase... Bring on 2022!

Week 24 - Green.

I have my partner to thank for this. Stuck for ideas and running out of time, concious of the fact that I've done a couple of garden shots recently, so having ruled that out, She asked how it was going at dinner yesterday... "well what about the bananas.... they're a bit green?". Sometimes the answer is literally in front of your face... in a bowl! :ROFLMAO:

Ripening by Nick, on Flickr
 
Sets my teeth on edge just looking at them - but an original take on the theme.
 
Hi Nick

Only just green at the edges, but it's there, nice shot of your Bananas, I like the subtle reflection.

Pete
 
Green
A great idea to use unripe banana's.
I really like the diffused reflection.
 
Clever idea Nick well thought out, well your OH that is ..


I can't stand green ones either @Boots makes me feel a little sick TBH.
 
Boots said:
Sets my teeth on edge just looking at them - but an original take on the theme.
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Thanks!
Mine too... I have to be patient. At this time of Year, if I buy them yellow, they're only fit for banana bread by the following day (which is not necessarily a bad thing).

seaodyssey said:
Hi Nick
Only just green at the edges, but it's there, nice shot of your Bananas, I like the subtle reflection.
Pete
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Cheers!
The vague reflection makes the shot for me. Having chosen the subject, it was a case of 'how can I make this a bit more interesting?'.

Bebop said:
Good idea. I like the hint of a reflection too and the framing you have chosen.
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Thank you!
Sadly not my idea.... but hey... it still counts!

Nostromo said:
Green
A great idea to use unripe banana's.
I really like the diffused reflection.
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Thanks!
The surface is actually the top of a black chest freezer, that just throws enough reflection out. I've found it handy a few times over the years.

Cobra said:
Clever idea Nick well thought out, well your OH that is ..


I can't stand green ones either @Boots makes me feel a little sick TBH.
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Cheers!
I'm not a fan of green ones... but they came in handy on this occasion.
 
Well composed and lit. It reminds me of lockdown shopping... my neighbours always asked for very green bananas and I used to spend ages hunting through the display....
 
Allan.H said:
Nice image the slight reflection really adds to it
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Thanks!
As subtle as it is, without the reflection it would have been fit for the bin.

HelenC said:
Well composed and lit. It reminds me of lockdown shopping... my neighbours always asked for very green bananas and I used to spend ages hunting through the display....
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Cheers!
The light is natural, our kitchen has a couple of useful spots depending on the time of day.
 
Week 25 - Snappers Choice.

I liked this one for it's grim, grittiness. Kind of touristy I guess, but I liked the feel of the room, the light from the high window, and to me there's an added ugliness in the obvious fakeness of the birds, hung for years, dusty and decayed.

Two Braces by Nick, on Flickr
 
Interesting image Nick (y) ( and possibly not to everyone's taste)
Had it been mine I think I would have added a touch more contrast and a tad of grit though.
 
Interesting shot and location by the looks of it. I can't decide if I would have cropped in on the birds more.. but works well as it is too.
 
HelenC said:
Interesting shot and location by the looks of it. I can't decide if I would have cropped in on the birds more.. but works well as it is too.
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Same. It's a good one but I;d have cropped out the windows.
 
Cobra said:
Interesting image Nick (y) ( and possibly not to everyone's taste)
Had it been mine I think I would have added a touch more contrast and a tad of grit though.
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Thanks!
I thought it had enough when viewing on my tablet (Acros at 3200), but looking at it now it could take a little more dirt.

Allan.H said:
Strange image but fascinatingly macabre
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Cheers!
I thought so too. I'm sure to some it's a perfectly normal scene... just a food store, but for someone raised in the supermarket generation it looks primitive and brutal somehow.

HelenC said:
Interesting shot and location by the looks of it. I can't decide if I would have cropped in on the birds more.. but works well as it is too.
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Thank You!
It was taken at Audley End House and Gardens. Well worth a visit! I did look at a crop but I preferred the feel of the wider image.

-Oy- said:
Same. It's a good one but I;d have cropped out the windows.
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Thanks!
Oddly enough I wish I'd been able to get more of the windows in, but from the doorway I was a little resticted.
 
A little stuck this week, but I had to dig 'Ol' Thumper' out as I've been booked to do a Country-ish album later this month and this is the perfect tool for that kind of job. Looking down from the headstock, looking down the neck... ok, we can all see it's actually horizontal... but still, a figure of speech and all that?

Ol' Thumper by Nick, on Flickr
 
Nicely done Nick :)
 
A different kind of down - I like it.

I always wanted a 5 string bass. Couldn't play with 4 sadly...
 
-Oy- said:
Nicely done Nick :)
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Thank You!

Harlequin565 said:
A different kind of down - I like it.

I always wanted a 5 string bass. Couldn't play with 4 sadly...
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Cheers!
I sort of accidentally bought a 5 string back in the late 80s... I was youbg... hey, more must be better right? I do have 6 strings that I use for solo stuff, but for any band work or hired dates I always reach for a 5. For my own band, it's always the one in the picture. I had it built back in 2016, and while I have more exotic and complex instruments, there's something about it's simplicity that always works.
 
NickD said:
I sort of accidentally bought a 5 string back in the late 80s... I was youbg... hey, more must be better right?
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I bought a fretless, also in the 80s because... hey - no frets is cooler right? Best I could do was a half baked impression of Peter Hook with it slung down to my knees. Clueless...
 
Looking down
That's a good pov. I would like to see a bit more room at the top of the shot, but that's probably just me. It's a good black and white.
 
Cobra said:
The same can be said for the image too Nick (y)
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Thanks!
There isn't much to it, but it works.

HelenC said:
Nice dof, textures and tones. Works well in mono.
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Cheers!
Everythingworks well in mono IMO!

Nostromo said:
Looking down
That's a good pov. I would like to see a bit more room at the top of the shot, but that's probably just me. It's a good black and white.
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Thank You!
I would have liked it to be a little less tight at the top, but sadly the limitations of my hallway ruled that out without changing the angle of the shot. I did experiment, but preferred the really low angle, which meant having to crop that closely at the top.
 
Week 27 - Indigenous.

Closest I could think... My Mate cup, given to me some years ago by an Argentinian friend who was visiting us for the London beer festival (he's a brewer). An arduous couple of weeks of playing tour guide around London's best breweries and brewery bars, in between the beer festival.... happy days!

Anyway...

'The indigenous Guaraní and some Tupí communities (whose territory covered present-day Paraguay) first cultivated and used yerba mate prior to European colonization of the Americas. Its consumption was exclusive to the natives of only two regions of the territory that today is Paraguay, Only after the Jesuits discovered its commercialization potential, that it became widespread throughout the province and even to others in the Spanish Crown.[5] The leaves of the plant are steeped in hot water to make a beverage known as mate. Brewed cold, it is used to make tereré. Both the plant and the beverage contain caffeine.

Mate is traditionally consumed in central and southern regions of South America, primarily in Paraguay, as well as in Argentina, Uruguay, southern and central-western Brazil, the Gran Chaco of Bolivia, and southern Chile. It has also become popular in the Druze and Alawite community in the Levant, especially in Syria and Lebanon, where it is imported from Paraguay and Argentina, thanks to 19th-century Syrian immigrants from Argentina. Yerba mate can now be found worldwide in various energy drinks as well as being sold as a bottled or canned iced tea.' - Wikipedia

Mate Al Fresco by Nick, on Flickr
 
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Nice image Nick.
Thanks for the narrative I had no idea what it actually was.
 
Narrative really helps :) A nice simple composition too.
 
Harlequin565 said:
Narrative really helps :) A nice simple composition too.
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Thanks!
I did look at other compositions, from above showing the mate leaves, and wider compositions with dried mate and other paraphenalia around, but there's so much (to me) going on in the cup itself, that I went with the simple view.
 
That's a lovely object and thanks for the explanation. Paraguay and Argentina are on my bucket list for photographic locations.
 
HelenC said:
That's a lovely object and thanks for the explanation. Paraguay and Argentina are on my bucket list for photographic locations.
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Thanks!
Argentina is like the badlands at the moment, then again I suspect we're not far behind.... the whole world is going crazy.
 
Indigenous - An interesting thing, and well presented.
Looking Down - works nicely. Good use of DoF and the mono processing works really well.
Snappers - In B&W I wouldn't have known that the birds were fake without you saying.
Green - Nicely shot. Good use of the black, but with enough reflection to avoid that 'floaty' look.
 
Green
It's always a quandary how green a banana you should buy. I've definitely had some in the past that never ripened and were not enjoyable. The reflection adds that bit extra to the image.

Snapper's Choice
The fake birds have an almost comical feel to them. The window falling on the "birds" adds to the overall feeling but might benefit from more contrast.

Looking down
All the lines work well to take you through the image, possibly a bit more space at the bottom and all the keys(?) in focus. I can remember trying to play an electric guitar with the plug in flyspeck mini amplifier, soon discovered I didn't have musical talent.

Indigenous
I'm sure the tour guide role with all that beer drinking was a task you "suffered through" gladly. The form of the vessel has been well captured. Is there any markings on the other two thirds hidden from view?
 
LC2 said:
Indigenous - An interesting thing, and well presented.
Looking Down - works nicely. Good use of DoF and the mono processing works really well.
Snappers - In B&W I wouldn't have known that the birds were fake without you saying.
Green - Nicely shot. Good use of the black, but with enough reflection to avoid that 'floaty' look.
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Thanks!
That's why the snappers image is in mono. On first glance I get away with it, but with the colour left in, the fakeness is much more obvious.

StuartPearson said:
Green
It's always a quandary how green a banana you should buy. I've definitely had some in the past that never ripened and were not enjoyable. The reflection adds that bit extra to the image.

Snapper's Choice
The fake birds have an almost comical feel to them. The window falling on the "birds" adds to the overall feeling but might benefit from more contrast.

Looking down
All the lines work well to take you through the image, possibly a bit more space at the bottom and all the keys(?) in focus. I can remember trying to play an electric guitar with the plug in flyspeck mini amplifier, soon discovered I didn't have musical talent.

Indigenous
I'm sure the tour guide role with all that beer drinking was a task you "suffered through" gladly. The form of the vessel has been well captured. Is there any markings on the other two thirds hidden from view?
Click to expand...

Cheers!

I'm not sure I believe in musical talent, I was a tuneless, uncoordinated idiot... 30 something years later and I'm just an idiot. Like photography it's just time and practice.

The drinking week was a bit arduous as I'm not really much of a drinker nowadays, but it was alot of fun. The staff at the craft breweries were awesome though. and we ended up doing a fair few impromtu brewery tours as the staff found out our friends brewed too. The Mate cup is pretty similar all the way round, I chose that angle due to the badge (which is from a bottle of really nice Malbec that they brought us as a gift).
 
NickD said:
I'm not sure I believe in musical talent, I was a tuneless, uncoordinated idiot... 30 something years later and I'm just an idiot. Like photography it's just time and practice
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There’s hope for me yet then, I have always appreciated jazz music, a good few years ago after an unexpected windfall I purchased a saxophone. I did try to learn it and could play some notes but my practicing fell by the wayside. Not helped by the fact you need to play regularly enough to maintain the embouchure. I will go back to it at some point, although it would be fighting with photography for time!!
 
StuartPearson said:
There’s hope for me yet then, I have always appreciated jazz music, a good few years ago after an unexpected windfall I purchased a saxophone. I did try to learn it and could play some notes but my practicing fell by the wayside. Not helped by the fact you need to play regularly enough to maintain the embouchure. I will go back to it at some point, although it would be fighting with photography for time!!
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There's always hope, and it's never too late!

Jazz is where it's at! Although our current project is a bit rocky, and I've a country album to do on thursday, most of my working day is accompanied by KJazz 88.1. It's not something to measure yourself against as a beginner though, at its best it's the pinnacle.
 
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Week 28 - Plant.

I have no idea what kind of plant it is, but it's monstrous, spreads like a weed and smells beautiful in the evening. In the morning it's full of these little guys.

Plant Based Menu by Nick, on Flickr
 
Some fantastic detail in there and the colours really pop. Lovely shot.
 
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