During the “great lockdown of 2020” I challenged a friend for a light-hearted photo challenge for each week.  The goal was to get our creative juices and give us something different to do during this difficult time.  It also was meant to make us feel better as we are missing out on our normal travel photography opportunities.

There are just 2 simple rules:  The photo must be new and taken without breaking the current lock-down regulations.

The first weekly challenge was themed “Shades of Grey” and my entry was table-top setup made of screws found in the shed.  The light behind was initially intended to be the moon, but it turned out that it looked more like a sun or a star.

The theme for the second week was “Reflection”.

For this one, I deliberated a bit on what to choose and setup.  I initially had thought of doing something with a set of mirrors that I bought a few years back to set up a large kaleidoscope for photography but settled on doing an infinite mirror type setup.

I started playing and found that I could turn the 2 bottles of hand sanitizer into as many as I wanted by adjusting the mirrors.  This is what I came up with.

In this image, only the front 2 bottles are there, and the others are just reflections.  For lighting, I used a LumeCube under each bottle – and that was all.

Just for reference, here is the setup used (sorry about the rough, hastily-taken, photograph)

This weeks photo – “Vintage”

This was a pretty straight-forward photo taken under natural light and then adjusted in a photo editor to my liking.

It is a portion of a box cover from a Monopoly set that I have that was sold in Australia around 1935.  I still have most of the set, but the condition is a bit poor now.  The markings seen in the photograph have been there for many years.

Runners-up

Before I settled onto the above image, I was thinking about using this image of an old Ricoh camera.  I was not too sure about it as it does not shout ‘vintage’, but I did have fun making it and I like it a lot.

Modern Vintage

This shot also didn’t make the grade – but that’s OK as it was taken as a bit of a gag.

It is of my old Commodore 64 computer hooked up to a modern television set.  The photo is made to look old but I didn’t have to try as I took it on my first digital camera that I got in 1997.

This the first camera that I bought as it had reached the almighty standard of taking 1024 x 768 pictures.

The shutter lag on this thing was terrible and it chewed through the batteries at an amazing rate, but it was still an great camera to have and it took lots of shots for me.

I was amused that when taking the above photo the camera had a whopping big 16 megabyte storage card in it.

The final shot for the week was just a detail shot of the keyboard of the Commodore 64 computer. I love to see all of the buttons that we no longer have on modern keyboards including ‘restore’.  This is what we all seem want right now – some sort of way to get us back to ‘normal’ before the virus.

 

That’s it for this week.  Let me know which photo you liked most for the themes.