The weekly photo challenge – arranged – offers itself to so many possibilities. At first, I arranged some empty Jones soda bottles and took a dozen photos of them. But when my kids decided they wanted to pull out the game Perfection, I thought that is exactly what I wanted to shoot.

All the pieces, neatly arranged in their respective boxes.

The countdown begins. 10…9…8…7…6…5…4…3…2…1…POP!

Canon 60D | 18-135 mm lens | 1/250 | f/16 | ISO 6400 | Speedlite 430EX II

Now, let me share some of the challenges I had in taking the shot.

First, I didn’t have a super-bright area to take the photos, which was necessary to use a fast shutter speed to stop the unarranged pieces without any blur. I mounted my flash for the extra light, but none of the auto settings on my Canon 60D would work well, so I had to switch to manual mode.

I used a small white table pushed up against the white wall so I could bounce the flash off the wall to eliminate the shadows from a head-on approach with the flash. It seemed to work well at eliminating the shadows, so the next challenge – timing.

I tried to snap just one photo when it popped, but my timing wasn’t the greatest. I went to more of an automated approach, and when I thought the pop was coming, I held down the button, snapping roughly a dozen photos before the pop. I did this about three times before I felt like I had the photo I wanted.

And, as a photographer’s note, I think that the number of times it took me to snap the right photo, having to reset the pieces each time, I could probably beat the game and place each piece before the 10-second timer would pop them up. After all, that is the name of the game, right?

~signed, Carltonaut