As I mentioned in the SocialMediaCampLondon2 blog post a couple of weeks ago, that day ended with a Photo Scavenger Hunt. It turned out to be hilarious! 

The rules were simple: Kat (from SafetyGoat) had created a list of items, which we had to find and take photos of, and each item would be awarded a number of points. You could score more points per photo if the photo was funny, or had at least one team member in it. I joined a team with Cristiano, Kevin and Farhan, and we called our team The Auto-Savers, in reference to Kat having lost the first version of the scavenger hunt list (because she closed the file without saving it).

The items on the list were ranging from simple to absurd; here’s a sample:

A jogger - 5 points

A Canadian flag - 10 points

Hamburger sauce - 10 points

Person with bright pink shirt giving thumbs up - 15 points

A unibrow - 25 points

Genuine celeb - 30 points

We had a great start, finding a lot of the items immediately. Here’s a couple of our photos:

A square (with team members!)

Person with bright pink shirt giving thumbs up

Kevin with onions

Someone on rollerblades

Me pouring a pint

The most surprising, amazing thing that happened to us though? We met Catherine Tate! (and unintentionally managed to annoy her) Our team had split up at the Waitrose in the Brusnwick Centre to find a couple of the items, leaving Cristiano at the front of the store with the camera to take photos whenever the rest of us had found something. We all came back to Cristiano discussing something about some item, only to have him shush us and whisper “I think Catherine Tate just walked past us”.

We didn’t believe him at first, but on closer inspection it turned out it was actually her! I walked up to her and asked her autograph, while Cristiano took a photo of us. She mistakenly thought he was paparazzi and turned irritatingly away from him; I apologized and said he was with me. We tried explaining the photo scavenger hunt, but by then she was already annoyed we had disturbed her shopping:

Still pretty cool, right? After that we wandered around for a little while, before heading back early to the pub to meet the other teams. In the end we won with a massive 470 points! If I remember correctly that was about 100 points more than the runner-up (so even if we hadn’t gotten our celebrity, we still would have won). The prize was a Hot Rod toy car and tickets to Spring Awakening (more about that another time). 

It was a fun end to an already great day, and I love to do something similar again. Anybody else interested in organizing our own scavenger hunt?

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I’m not sure how comfortable these seat belt camera straps are, but they sure look gorgeous:

You can get them at PhotoJojo.com for $20 and they’re available in 4 different colours (Porsche Purple, Mercedes Gold, T-bird Teal, and Dodge Silver).

Via Swiss Miss

I kind of failed my previous set photo challenge 52 Themes; I just couldn’t get around to keeping track of when I had to make what type of photo. Plus I hadn’t uploaded a photo to Flickr for almost a month. So I set myself a new challenge: uploading at least 1 photo for each day for the next 100 days. So it’s not a real project 365, I’m not taking a photo every single day. Shouldn’t be too difficult, right? As long as I have an internet connection

Day 1: This photo is from one of the buildings here near us. It just looks so dreamy, and it has a great view over the Thames.

Day 2: I love puppets. The Muppet Show. Avenue Q. The Storyteller (especially this!). I’ve always loved the shows that feature these type of puppets.

Day 3: This photo from my little sister (Cassie) is from more than a year ago (I think, it’s Christmas 2007); she’s way more photogenic than I am. I really like how it came out, cause it was shot with my old Casio Powershot.

Day 4: I passed this Christmas stall last December on the Southbank. It’s only later at home when I discovered it’s full of elephant items!

Day 5: This turned out slightly blurrier than I hoped for, but still like the result.

Day 6: I like modern architecture styles; this one is mathematically pleasing to the eye

Day 7: This was taken during the training of the world championship for Labyrinth, a cool social game. It involves drawing a “maze” (it’s not really a maze, it’s just one path) on the floor with chalk. Then one person is blindfolded in the middle and has to find his way out of the maze as quick as possible. The other people have to be the walls of the maze and are only allowed to humm to give tips on which way the blindfolded person has to go.

Day 8: I got to go to The Gadget Show Live last Saturday, a cool gadget exhibition in Birmingham. These are Sony Ericsson’s new Bluetooth watches that can act as a remote to your mobile phone. Pretty cool!

Day 9: I love the oldish feel of this photo, wish I could figure out how to pull this off with more of my photos.

Day 10: Gravity. According some people that’s how your supposed to pronounce “graffiti” (I’ve always believed it’s grah-vee-tee). Which has always annoyed the hell out of me.

Thanks to the wonderful Annie Mole from the Going Underground blog, I won a voucher to make my own book from Blurb. Blurb is a publishing company providing a print-on-demand book publishing service for the public. In other words: you can create your own books! Blurb offers a free downloadable book layout software client, BookSmart, with which you can create your own books with your own text and images. The completed book can then be uploaded to Blurb, and you can order any amount of copies. 

I decided on a photo book collecting all the photos I made in 2008. I first thought I wouldn’t have enough photos, but it’s amazing how many photos I actually made last year. I only went with the photos I thought were ‘worthy’ to be in such a book, but even then there were a fair amount. Later on I even realized I forgot to add all my photos from my Stonehenge trip; bit of a pity, cause there were some great ones in between them. Here’s how it turned out:

I tried Blurb about one and a half year ago to create a photo book of my family’s summer holiday. It turned out to be a great book, but at the time I had a lot of trouble with Blurb’s BookSmart software for the Mac. It was just so slow, it wasn’t nice to use at all. Those are all problems of the past though, cause now BookSmart works like a charm. Plus not only was I able to import iPhoto albums, but also Flickr sets.

Unlike a lot of other photobook ‘makers’, Blurb’s BookSmart has a great selection of layouts and options. You can really play around with each page, choosing different types of layouts to suit the photos. I’m still missing certain layouts though (like one single vertical photo centered), which don’t seem to difficult to add. 

The only problem I had with Blurb this time was the delivery. You pay about £4 for the cheapest delivery option, with no tracking and 10-15 day delivery estimate. I ordered my book on January the 31st and it arrived on February 23rd: that’s more than 3 weeks! (to be fair though: it was 16 working days, so it’s not too bad, but I remember last time it was way quicker than that)

I’m really happy with the way this book turned out and I’m going to try to make one every year for all that year’s photos. I’d love to make some other type of books though, like a cook book with recipes from my Mum, or a book with all my blog posts. Those will take much more time to create though, but Blurb offers great tools to make them!

Last Saturday I went to the London Transport Museum Flickr Scavenger Hunt (now that’s a mouthful) at the Museum Depot in Acton. We got 20 cryptic clues to find certain “objects” and make photos of them. I think our team became 2nd, with solving 17 of the 20 clues. 

Some of the clues were pretty tricky, but it was great fun trying to figure them all out. Here are two examples:

Clue: A literal 2CV model that doesn’t run on petrol.
Explanation: 2CV = deux chevaux = 2 horsies!

Clue: This caged wonder checks coins rather than defrosts ice.
Explanation: I’m really proud of solving this one! For starters, I noticed the “cages” and told my team the object should be somewhere in this area. Then we figured out that “defrosts ice” probably means “salt”. Finally after checking out most of the objects here, we found this:

If you look closely the brand is “Salter”. 

Besides those 20 clues, there were also photo clues, where we got a photo of something and had to find the exact same thing. I love this LOOtube photo (from an old Bakerloo line sign):

To check out all the photos, have a look at my Flickr set.

Water. Such a simple theme, but with so many different ways to capture it.

My 5th submission to 52 Themes. I got creative this week, and made a lot of photos of some not that normal objects. This is an upside-down photo of a decorative fake plant that was in our new apartment.

These photos are from an amazing photo shoot. The editorial is a collection of 6 photos, each of the same model at ages 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60. All the effects are done through make-up and lighting, no photoshop at all.

Check out all the photos at Miss at la Playa; here’s a sneak peak of ages 10 and 60:

I’m still a bit behind with uploading photos, cause of the move to the new apartment, but we now have a proper internet connection. Yay!

This photo was taken at night; I had forgotten to take a photo for this week and on the last day I sneaked outside to make some late-minute shots. It’s not really one of my favourites, but it does fit with the theme.

But this photo below I took one day before the 52 Themes “Natural World” week began. I was meaning to go back to the spot and take the photo again, so that it would be valid for 52 Themes, but I’ve been so busy I just couldn’t find the time. Still I love how it turned out: the detail of the green moss and the colours!

From Wikipedia: “The rule of thirds is a compositional rule of thumb in visual arts such as painting, photography and design. The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections. Proponents of the technique claim that aligning a subject with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centering the subject would.”

So does my photo contain tension, energy and interest?