Category: Artifacts

Seems that an autofocus lens and a bounce flash can make you some decent food porn.

Thanksgiving had a duck, cheesecake, mashed potatoes and minestrone soup.

Saturday had porkchops with apples and portobello mushrooms. The recipe came from Mark Bittman’s Basics – which is really a nicely structured book – with a couple modifications, instead of onions I used mushrooms and in lieu of wine I just used apple juice. I was surprised how all these came out. Maybe I’ll be getting into cooking or something now. I think my wife would appreciate it!

Last Sunday I ran around shooting my rabbits. Well, more like tried to get myself as flat to the ground as possible while trying to shoot rabbits while they sat around under the coffee table. Here are the ones that were good enough to post to facebook. Thanks to iphoto, its surprisingly easy to go through one’s photos and post them all around.

HEB has an upscale brand called “Central Market”. The produce here is consistently quite good and consistently quite expensive. We came here to get my cousin a bottle of wine for hosting Thanksgiving.

Of course, we completely forgot that his wife can’t drink at the moment!

In any case, I also brought a camera and had some fun along the way. I don’t know why so many of these came out well (usually I am posting one image out of twenty, but I only took about ten of these veggie shots in all) but it really does make one think of the cornucopia of food that just sits there waiting for us to step into a supermarket.

So here are a few pictures from a procrastination session from “Building Design and Construction Systems”. The photo of Peppercorn on the run is heavily worked, I kind of took Scott Bourne’s thoughts on Subject Attention Simplify (a very good article) and applied it to this one. The two bird photos were pretty straightforward with only tweaking to saturation and contrast, etc. I guess you can call them “digital shopped” because they are the best out of MANY, MANY shots from those session — way more pictures than anyone would have taken in the old days.

As you can see in the delta between shot and posting, I really need to sit down and sort through my photos more regularly! I suspect I need to start taking fewer (but more thoughtful) pictures because going through these massive galleries are really quite daunting!

About an hour from our apartment is Brazos Bend State Park. It was a really nice day on Sunday and the weather was gorgeous (aside from the fact we forgot sunscreen so we had to pay $8 for a dinky little bottle of that stuff). Lots of places to take pictures of local wildlife…including alligators!  In any case, it was such a nice experience, we ended up getting the annual state park pass and we’re gonna go check out some fall colors five hours out.  We’ll see, it should be interesting.

so here is some fruits of procrastinating from studying…enjoy =)

I spent some time just working a picture of Peppercorn and I thought it would be interesting to upload all three. The first one is the original shot out of the camera. Since I shoot raw, I never mess with white balance — especially since I spend most of my time just figuring out my exposure since so few of my lenses meter on the camera.

The first attempt was to try a drastically horizontal and centered composition. I spent quite some time trying to get it balanced right, however, I think in the end, it still had a Pepper head floating against the carpet.

After taking a break, I took another stab at it and I think I am much happier with this. I realized that the colorful stuff in the background helps anchor the image in space and I think keeping it at a relatively normal aspect ratio kept it in the “photograph” realm as opposed to entering the “graphic design” realm (at which point I would need to do a lot more processing). I must add that shooting in RAW, while a bit heavy on hard disk space, gives you so much extra control over the post processing output that I unequivocally recommend it to anyone who plays with their shots after they upload it to their machine.

In general I do a lot of processing on the photos — sometimes the come straight out clean, but usually I do tweak a lot of little things here and there. For this photo, clearly more of a blurry composition, I did push the blues and I did push the highlights on Badger’s back as well as from the bottom corner. I’ve never really subscribed to the sanctity of the initial image — though I do try to avoid pushing things so far that they look like digital paintings (even if the photograph has been pushed and pulled a tremendous amount).