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Quarantine Activity: Gather Everything of One Color

Quarantine Activity: Gather Everything of One Color

Gather everything in your house of one color, then take a picture of it. I was inspired by a post on the r-quarantineactivities subreddit and worked with my gir...
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Gather everything in your house of one color, then take a picture of it. I was inspired by a post on the r-quarantineactivities subreddit and worked with my girlfriend to craft this composition.
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Jun, 2020

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Behind The Lens

Location

The central theme of this photo is the color blue, so we naturally had to shoot it in the only blue room in our house, and against the only uninterrupted wall in the room.

Time

I love using available natural light and I'm a big fan of the light that comes through the bay window opposite of this wall, so I made sure to shoot it on a sunny day in the afternoon, when the sun had moved far enough west that it poured directly into the window.

Lighting

As I said above, this was in the afternoon when the early spring sun had gone west enough to have a direct shot at the west-facing window that acted as the source of most of our light. I had a fill light to prevent too dramatic a transition on the left side of the photo, and to make sure you could see all of the little details in the blue items stacked all over.

Equipment

Canon EOS 80D with a Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8 lens, shot on an tripod because there wasn't *that* much light, and I wanted a healthy depth of field to maintain details on all of the little blue items. I'm pretty sure it was a softbox on the fill light, but it may have been an umbrella.

Inspiration

A post on the Reddit sub called r/QuarantineActivities, where people listed out ideas of how to fill your time in lockdown in fun and creative ways. Somebody posted that they decided to pick a color, then find everything in their apartment of that color, then take a picture. She'd picked blue and was wearing a blue silk robe while sipping curacao and listening to a blue Frank Sinatra record. I had a similar blue robe, so I made sure to include it as a nod to the original post and its creator. We'd planned on going through six colors of the rainbow, one for each color. We made it through red and yellow, but haven't advanced to the secondary colors just yet.

Editing

Of course I did. I applied one of my presets that encourages colors to pop and brightens up shadows. I also worked a little more heavily on the left side brightening up a few little knick knacks and removing some of the glare from the wall.

In my camera bag

It depends on the bag, but my Canon 80D and Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8 are standard, but I usually throw in either my 50mm f/1.8 or super wide 10-18mm f/4.5, depending on what I'm shooting. Add a tripod in lower lighting conditions, of course, and I always carry a set of microfiber towels, various filters, and an Allen wrench in case my Peak hand strap needs any adjustments.

Feedback

Honestly, just have fun and don't be afraid to completely change things up if the situation calls for it. We started shooting this the day before and took about a hundred shots, but it just didn't feel right. My partner and muse, the subject of the photo, suggested shooting at an angle, rather than straight on, and rearranging all of the accoutrements to better fit with the human in the photo. We were completely set up and it took a long time to get everything gathered and arranged, but once I let that go and really looked at our scene and the first day's photos, I realized that she was right. We took our time and reassembled everything and the result was so much better.

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Quarantine Activity: Gather Everything of One Color

Gather everything in your house of one color, then take a picture of it. I was inspired by a post on the r-quarantineactivities subreddit and worked with my gir... Read more

Behind The Lens

See more amazing photos, follow benallenphotos

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Gather everything in your house of one color, then take a picture of it. I was inspired by a post on the r-quarantineactivities subreddit and worked with my gir...
Read more

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Earn coins, get amazing rewards. Join for free.