How do you scavenge

Hi, I am Greg and I am a hunt addict. 
I have been asked to write an article on something hunt related by Lauri with the choice of subject left up to me.  So, between myself and Penny we decided to write about the process that we use to complete a scavenger hunt.
It all begins with the words.  In the current hunt we have a whopping 26 words.  On the surface this number looks daunting but with a little organisation the task becomes manageable. Once we have the words, we make a hard copy of them.  Then brainstorm different ideas for each word. Sometimes these ideas are very much left of field.  If we take hunt 23 as a guide.  The words were
  • Community
    • Community hall
    • Knitting group
    • Mob of sheep
  • Dream
    • Dream portal
    • Dream scape
    • Dream police
    • Dream of space tourism… Would you like a cup of tea?
  • Hunt
    • Hunt for the golden ticket
    • Hunting for clues (sherlock holmes)
    • Hunt for a station on a vintage radio
    • Archer stalking prey
  • List
    • Shopping list
    • Ship listing
    • Code list Visual Basic
    • To do list… Funny options
  • Judge
    • Gavel being bought down – show movement
    • See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil
    • Blue ribbon agricultural show – Judged best in show
  • Photography
    • How is an image created… BTS
    • Green screen and stuffed toys
  • Scavenger
    • Seagulls after chips at the beach
    • Ants
    • Bin Chickens (they are a thing… Look them up)
Additionally, we use a dictionary and thesaurus to find alternate meanings of words.  I regularly like to find meanings that others don’t use and think that I have done a great hunt if I come up with a maximum amount of unique ideas.  Bottom line time spent here makes the task so much easier.
Once you have ideas for all the words, don’t sit there and think that you have done a great job…  Get out and take photos.  It doesn’t really matter what of.  Just get in the habit of taking photos.  Using this approach, I have found excellent ideas that I had not previously considered. For this I use whichever camera I have with me.  This could be my Nikon d7200, Olympus OMD-EM10 or even my Pixel 3. 
The camera used is not important.  Some of my favourite photos were taken with my phone.  Just taking photos at random can seem like a waste of time so when you are walking around keep the list handy and look for hunt related themes.
Several ideas above required props.  For golden ticket we needed Cadbury chocolate bars.  Not sure how many but somewhere around 10.  We used photoshop to make it look like there were more in the background.  I believe there were four or five different layers here.
I also needed to have an authentic looking winners’ ticket.  For this I used Word and yellow paper (I found the text on the internet). This was Penny’s image and idea.  I mainly helped with Photoshop and art direction.
For photography I decided to show a behind the scenes of how I took a self portrait for the word Bliss (in hunt 15). I replicated Harry Joy from the Australian movie Bliss who believed he was about to die.  This is the image I ended up with.  For this shoot I needed quite a list of props cigarettes (I don’t smoke), party hats, candles, wine (red and white), nibbles for the table, braces and various other things that escape me now.  I also had to grow a moustache.  This came out too light, so I had to darken it.  We used charcoal for this.
The image I wanted to take was a top down looking at the table and camera setup as I was actually taking the shot.  I had a remote control for the Nikon which was strapped to the baluster in our stairwell.  My Olympus was at the end of the table on a tripod with the timer set to take an image every 5 seconds for two minutes.  The background was added in later and was a bokeh shot of some foliage from our garden.  If you zoom in on the table, you will see the advertising image that has the pose that I was trying to recreate.  This was a lot of fun to shoot if not a little technically challenging.
The important thing about being a hunter is to have fun. Take a chance and try something new.  You never know where it will lead. Being a hunter is not about winning it is about being creative.  If you happen to win that is great.  But if you go into the hunt expecting to win you may be disappointed.  The scavenger hunt has many talented individuals and the judges are human and each has their own ideas of what makes a great image.  Of course, if you are awesome (you know who you are), then feel free to expect to win and I look forward to seeing your awesomeness.
If you want to see what I ended up with for round 23 then go to this link (Hunt 23 images) on my blog site.
 
 
Bliss
Photography

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