The first day started with a total mess at the office and I just had time to do a snap­shot of a fire engine that I ran through Light­room to give it some kind of a light­ing setup and color retuche. This snap­shot should some­what accom­pany me for the rest of the week.

The sec­ond day I had some more time. I thought it would be a good idea to grab the fire engine again (hon­estly I had the “great” idea of adding the fire engine to all of the remain­ing 41 pho­tos) and see, where I could place it to get a nice shot. Finally I came around our kicker where I tried sev­eral per­spec­tives before I came up with the final shot. It again ran through Light­room for bet­ter light­ing and col­ors. This was the first one I really liked.

Day three I had my cam­era and the fire engine with me when I went for lunch. I had the idea of putting the fire engine in front of a real car to uti­lize the dif­fer­ence in size for a good per­spec­tive. Long story short: it didn’t work out. I had to come up with another pic­ture setup. I tried sev­eral shots at the bistro I had lunch at. None of theme really con­vinced me. But again some Light­room touch up did the trick.

Day four. Busy at the office and not a sin­gle idea on what to shoot. I finally shot the fire engine on my notebook’s key­board and let Light­room do the rest.

On day five I wanted to wait for the evening to take a pic­ture on my way home or at home. At home I tried sev­eral still life setups using vases, can­dle­hold­ers and stuff like that. I also tried sev­eral dif­fer­ent persepc­tives on the fire engine crawl­ing on the floor or stand­ing on a lad­der. It all looked some­what odd or even bor­ing. Finally I placed the fire engine on top of our din­ner table’s lamp. It is an alloy ring with frosted glas on top and bot­tom so the light shines in both direc­tions. That gave the fire engine a really nice look. Light­ing is every­thing! Only small dig­i­tal enhance­ments needed this day.

Sat­ur­day, day six. Await­ing guests on Sun­day I had to pre­pare din­ner. Some time after 8 p.m. I finally man­aged to start shoot­ing. This day I wanted to play around with light­ing a lit­tle bit more. So two pocket torches were a must. And also a boom­box that has some blue lights to its sides should be placed on the pic­ture. I tried around in com­plete dark­ness using a tri­pod and self release. On the camera’s dis­play it looked great, espe­cially the blue light (I usu­ally hate all those gad­gets with blue lights, but this time it helped). Sadly enough it looked poor when viewed on the screen. I started all over and found a blue plas­tic trash can. The fire engine looked nice inside with the two torches light­ing the can from the out­side. Light­room and a radial blur did the rest.

Sun­day, day seven. While cook­ing the din­ner we chat­ted about the 42 days project and came up with a sim­ple still life setup in the kitchen. Nice and easy. And definitly the last shot with the fire engine in it!

What I learned from this first week is that it is really hard to come up with new ideas every day. And that it is even harder to inte­grate the same item on every photo. But the most impor­tant learn­ing was that even this kind of work is much eas­ier with peo­ple around brain­storm­ing together.