I Can See it For You Wholesale

GUESS NICK’S ETHNICITY!

Nope, not Jewish. Although it’s the most popular guess in recent years. (Much as Eskimo was the most popular guess when I was a kid.)

There’s a pair of Black Phoebes camped out above one of our windows at work. Surprisingly, the shade beneath the overhang is quite intense, even on days when a few feet away, the sun is baking the lawn. This is probably a situation that calls for flash or a reflector, but I suspect that might seriously piss off the occupants of the office. : )

So, I cranked up my tripod to bring the camera up near the height of the next, set the slowest shutter speeds I could that would still capture motion, and triggered the shutter by remote.

These are pretty much my first usable shots of nesting birds and chicks. I’m pretty pleased, although I’ll probably take a few more cracks at it if I can before the little guys take off.

I’m still living in denial about the utility of flash. This doesn’t trouble me often, because when I’m out and about, I don’t usually mind shooting at f/1.4 and cranking the ISO if I have to. But some things just don’t look good that way, and food is (usually) one of them.

I face other barriers when trying to photograph food, one of the most prominent being that, while I can sometimes cook delicious food, I have never been able to cook food that is at all photogenic or even amenable to food styling. This issue is easily circumvented, however, by using someone else’s food, which is what I did here, with these cookies, which were both delicious and attractive.

Unfortunately, the kitchen they were baked in was small and dim. The only light available was what slipped in through the window past a lot of tree branches — and, even less useful, a bare incandescent bulb that I know by experience to be very hard to white balance after the fact, even shooting RAW and with a reference point.

Fortunately, while I still labor under the burden of my anti-Strobe prejudices, I finally got over my anti-Tripod ones, and so I was simply able to kill the incandescent, bust out my Manfrotto 055XPROB with its horizontally postionable center column, and slap my 55mm f/3.5 Micro on there for a few ten-second exposures.

It took me a while to get usable perspectives. In order to get all the cookie I needed without getting a bunch of unpleasant visual clutter, I set up almost directly over the cookies. I had to make sure that neither the camera nor the tripod was between the cookies and the dim window light — the difference between illumination and shadow was insignificant to the eye, but (when I accidentally blocked what light there was) very significant to the sensor after tens seconds. : )