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All posts for the month February, 2011

Let me take a moment to promote my Wife’s new food blog, Girl Meets Oven. She has spent a lot of time and effort getting this blog started, and we hope it becomes a smash hit. We’ve also joked (more seriously than joking, though) that we will need to get a treadmill and start working out more with all these yummy baked goods around.

As always, there is a full set of these photos available on my Flickr Photostream. Please take a moment after reading this post to explore them (or just jump right there). Every one of these photos was taken with a very basic setup consisting of my Canon 50D with a Bower SFD 52C flash on top, typically pointed at 60 to 90 degrees from the focal plane. All were taken with my new favorite lens for use around the house, my Sigma 50 mm f2.8 macro lens. I played with adjusting my flash exposure compensation a bit, and found that backing it off by 1/3rd to 2/3rds of a stop sometimes gave a bit better result, depending on where the flash was bouncing.

First off, we’ll start with our busy worker bee, who found herself the subject of my photo while concentrating on composing her own photo.

Photographer as Subject

Next, let’s take a close up look at some of the key ingredients of the cookies she was baking. Here are some cherry and chocolate chips, mixed together in a bowl:

Cherry and Chocolate Chips

And another macro shot of some ground cinnamon and nutmeg (I think):

Grated Nutmeg and What

Here’s another ingredients shot. We’ve got a mix of walnuts, dried cherries and chocolate chips in a coffee mug:

Cherries Walnuts Chocolate Chips

And finally, a few images of the finished product:

Cookies to Cool

Cooling More Cookies

Cooling Cookie

And again, there are more photos in this set, so hop on over to my Flickr page to check them out! No, I didn’t help much with the preparation and baking of the cookies. In fact, I probably got in the way a lot. But when it came time to eat these tasty cookies, I was more than ready to offer my taste buds up for the challenge!

Now, on to shopping for a treadmill. . .

Another really simple post this time. Just wandered around the house and grabbed these images.

Here are two variations on the same photo of our cockatiel, Birdie.

Birdie Two

Birdie One

I like the top version better because I think the colors pop. Lori likes the bottom version better because she says it is softer. The bottom one is pretty much exactly as it came off the camera, after a bit of cropping.

Birdie was a “rescue” from a friend. Birdie had a run-in with one of their cats and was injured, so they decided she needed a new home. She has since fully recovered and can fly around just fine.

Here’s a photo of Lori preparing the evening meal. Red potatoes are my favorite, but I’m not a big fan of how she handles that knife.

Lori in the kitchen

Not a whole lot of action in the photography realm the past couple of weeks. Here are a few photos of one of my favorite subjects, our dog Ruffy. Here’s an experiment with my new 50mm macro lens. Very shallow depth of field.

IMG_0011_mod

I love the textures and contrast between his fur and the grass in this next one.

Ruffy on the prowl

Finally, a favorite shot which happens to be one of the first few shots taken with my 50D through the back screen door.

Ruffy through the screen door