Preparing Dinner

When I’m in the right frame of mind, a photograph can come from anywhere. It’s one of the reasons I’m almost always carrying my full camera kit around with me when I’m out: I’d rather carry a few kilos of kit for nothing than be kicking myself for a single missed photo.

Sometimes I’m lucky, and an image can show up whilst I’m at home, saving me the effort of lugging my kit around. The downside to that is, I can very easily get sidetracked from what I was supposed to be doing to take photos, and if it’s something that’s at home and not going anywhere, I can get a bit carried away.

Whilst preparing dinner one evening, I laid out the ingredients on the side. One of the quirks of our kitchen is that the main preparation surface is by the window, making for great lighting. So as I arranged the various bits and bobs in the light of the evening I couldn’t help but notice their photogenic qualities.

When I first started shooting them, I decided to, once again, try some HDR shooting. Since my trip to the St Margarets railway bridge I’d learnt how to shoot automatically bracketed exposures with my camera, making me far more likely to try it out. I’m not quite sure what prompted me to try it in this instance, since this is the sort of imagery that benefits from strong sidelight and shadows.

That’s probably why none of the attempted HDR images worked out.

In fact, when it was all said and done, dinner was eaten and I’d processed the photos, only three images were good enough to warrant keeping them (although I kept the three HDR exposures for each shot, should I wish to return to the HDR idea in the future).

This was before I’d bought a flashgun, so I had to make use of the available natural light, meaning when I closed the aperture up to f/8 to get a little more of the vegetables in focus, I had to push the ISO up to 4000. A bit of noise has crept in as a result, but all told these few images didn’t come out too badly. Also I got away without my wife killing me for making dinner late.