The Colour Red!!!

So Gizmodo.co.uk like to run the occasional Shooting Challenge.
Generally speaking I miss it or fail to get a shot done in time. This time is not much different except I was determined to get an entry in so... despite not having anything on the final day of entries i decided to give it a stab.

Now today I was in the office so I had the following amounts of time available.
13:00-14:00 lunch hour
17:00-18:00 Time between when I get home and the time submissions must be entered by.

So... 2 hours.

Here's the brief of what needed to be achieved:

For this week’s Shooting Challenge, I want you to make a photograph or series of photographs that focuses on the colour red. I’m looking for creative photographs that instantly draw the viewers to that colour. I don’t want to see any ‘selective colour’ photography as this usually requires some post­processing work and only minimal global post­processing is permitted.

I had a few basic ideas. I wasn't going to have too much time to experiment THAT much but I'd been thinking of grabbing some large black tiles to use as photographic backgrounds for a long while and this seemed like a good excuse.
I grabbed myself two black tiles, one very reflective one and one non-reflective one and a shiney red tile.
I looked for other materials whilst I was there but I had to head back to work.

So that was it. I got home at 17:00, dug out my cheapo studio lighting kit and shot away.
Here are those results.

 The above shot shows one of the problems I had along the way. Dust, lint and just... bits of stuff showed up very easily on the tiles. I spent a fair while wiping them down as even after I got them clear some dust would settle a bit later on.

 My son had left out his felt tip pens, in fact, namely just his red one which I took to be a sign.

After I'd finished with the tiles I had about ten minutes left before I had to get the photos off the camera and sent to Gizmodo.
Before I did  that though I really wanted to try an experiment using red food colouring dropped into water in a clear container.

I didn't submit any of these because they required far too much post-processing to get to how they are but they were an interesting 10-15 minute experiment.

The food colouring will just sink to the bottom of the water on it's own, you need to mix it with something thicker. On this occasion I used milk.

Finally just for fun I played with the Hue/Saturation and made it not red any more.

So there you go. With less than an hours worth of prep and a bit of determination this is the sort of thing you can spin out of your camera folks.

A quick trip to Berne

So work sent me to Switzerland this week to do worky things for worky reasons.
The above shot was taken on the train that formed part of the journey to reach Berne, (where the worky things would come to pass).
It is an image of clouds breaking over Lake Geneva which, as lakes go, is pretty big.

That's pretty much all I got for the trip until the final day when I had an hour and thirty minutes before checking out of the hotel to explore Berne, so a quick self planned tour of the Old Town was underway, as can be seen below.
There were only two things I was told about to keep my eye open for. A child eating ogre and a pit full of bears... I didn't find the bears...

I don't know what this game is but I guess someone had forgotten to put it away the last time they played it.

A Gargoyle. I have a thing for gargoyles and wish I could've investigated further to see what else was around. This chap managed to catch my eye without much scrutiny however... Poor chap!
... Enter now the Baby eating ogre fountain!

I'm not sure if the baby eating boogey man fountain is that wierd though as, on my way back to the hotel to check-out I noticed another of the fountains that otherwise looked quite normal bearing a slight... oddity that otherwise might've been missed. ..

... Is that a musket wielding bear-cub?

Finally, one of my favourite shots, clouds breaking over the Alps I believe. I never usually have opportunity to see things like this and it was great to get to capture it in my camera.