I was adding some feed to bird feeder, when I noticed this piece of ice below the table on my balcony. I snapped an image with an iPhone, and run some filters in Best Camera (you can check out the recipe here). Are you seeing any animal in that? I saw a fish with its mouth up, or a small critter sitting on its back with paws up.

In food photography (or for that matter in almost any kind of photography) most of the times the difference between great and so so picture is in second plan. Total image experience is built not only by the main role player but also by all those props that are nicely blurred out by bokeh in the background.

The problem is that building nice second plan set can quickly add to quite an expense. In pursuit to save some green (and any other color for that matter) we decided to go and browse through local thrift stores. I was quite surprised actually how many there are. After spending better part of last Saturday shopping we brought home quite a collection of different things we intend to use in our shots. Here is just a sample (wine is ours ):

And here is the best part of it – all those things cost less than gas we burned to drive to all those stores!

Today’s image comes from the same session Tomasz mentioned several days ago. We were finishing off our evening in the studio, when I thought- how about paring a yellow gerbera with a yellow lemon? He was not very convinced at first, and when I set it up and took several images, I was not so sure myself. But it somehow transformed on the screen into quite an interesting still life.

I was in the mood just to photograph something. I wasn’t sure what, I wanted it to be reasonably small (as opposed to landscape ) and colorful. Which I could photograph from a distance and from up close. It was actually Tomasz who came up with idea of buying some apples, next time we did shopping. So we did. We bought two apples out of each variety in the store . I am sure the woman at the register did not appreciate it much. Anyway, I took some photos with my universal zoom 18-200 mm, and decided to play with macro filters on Lensbaby. I just loved the images when I opened them in Lightroom.

I took this photograph in Mamie Doud Eisenhower birthplace, in small town of Boon, Iowa. The guide was walking us through collection, mostly objects “from the era”, when I noticed this sculpture and how it reflects in the mirror behind it. I took this image, and then when I was looking for something to turn in black and white, it caught my eye. Usually, I go through presets in my Lightroom B&W collection to see how other settings would look like. After I turned the image into greyscale, I decided to put back some red, to draw some additional attention to the mirror and reflection there.

Nice, isn’t it?

Iza complains that I should say something longer here to keep up with the tradition. Well then. This one was actually a little tough to take. I still didn’t mastered the Nikon’s CLS and I have problems with balancing foreground and background light. Actually the only way I was able to achieve what I wanted to get was to put the remote one in manual mode. Oh well, another million of takes and we’ll get there.

My idea for today’s blog wen to hell in the basket, so I am going to improvise. Shouldn’t be too hard, with last week events. I got new camera, a prime, faster lens and a new filter. New camera is awesome. The prime, 30 mm on Dx camera is a challenge, and I am learning how to use legs to compose . The supposedly IR filter turned to be not. So I am left with large set of orange tinted, well composed and interesting photos. With a lot of possibilities. Like replacing orange cast with green….

Finally, I have time today to look back and arrange photos I have been taking on weekend. Between Easter, house guest, hiking, working and partying, it is not easy to find time even to delete bad ones . Anyway, I bought those orange Asian lilies to decorate the table for Easter breakfast. And to introduce some spring, as the nature apparently refuses us this simple and timely pleasure this year. I have been photographing them over and over again, with Lensbaby and macro filter. It is just an example of the outcome.

This is one of the photos which was done by accident, and turned into something interesting. It was actually a trial shot, when a friend of mine was setting up stuff to shoot food in the restaurant a few weeks ago. I just took out my camera and took some photos to see the light and setting etc. I normally do not delete any photos from camera, I look at everything at the end of the day on the computer. And I was glad I don’t, as this photo was worth preserving. Not only the colors are creating certain atmosphere here, but also there seem to be depth in this image.

I am flirting from time to time with HDR images. I think I figure how to take photos for them already (in short- turn all the automatics in camera and make -2eV, 0eV and +2eV without moving the camera), but Tone Mapping and getting the reasonably looking photo is still a magic. I gave another try today. I had the photos of tulips at 1/30, 1/80 and 1/100 sec, just because I was trying to figure out how to make sky look.. like sky, but since it was done on tripod, I figured out afterward- why not give it another try. Photomatix Tone Compressor loked much simpler than Details Enhance, so I went with the first.