129. Spice - November 29-December 5, 2015
Paul-
As far as I know, this is the first time I've donned plastic gloves and a breathing mask to work with the WPOTM theme. (No joke.)
Sure, I submitted the theme “Elemental” in Year One (wherein everyone shot a picture in which the element of their choice was the main subject). And yes, I did select Plutonium 239 for that one. But it’s a tribute to my unassailable manliness that I find it harmless. It’s that nasty green Kryptonite that induces paroxysm and pain in me. (Kal-El’s gustatory preferences aside, I’m pretty sure Kryptonite is not a spice. Cooks, help me out here.)
Anyway, I was working with eight spices in my picture—not including several others I rejected because they didn’t add anything to the grouping in the way of color or texture. Some spices are very odoriferous. Unless you see some logic I’m missing, eight glass bowls holding different spices significantly adds to the effect. As such, my nano-studio quickly became a kind of volatile olfactory mélange that brought to mind scenes from Frank Herbert’s Dune as well as an 18th century Paris brothel. (It’s better that you don’t ask me how I know this.)
To the more observant among you (which, I regret, is all of you), this is not the first time I have submitted a picture of something round or spherical. Sorry, I am very fond of both shapes, if only for the egalitarian way they treat any point along the line or surface, respectively. Every point is equidistant from the center. There's a fundamental, topological fairness about it.
Wow, am I off-topic. Again.
This was probably not the most creative submission I could/should have turned in. But it was kind of fun.
Our story so far: Shot at .4 sec.; f/36; ISO 1000; 18-55mm lens set at 55mm; aperture priority; center-weighted averaging; -1/3 EV; camera mounted on copy stand with front of lens approximate 30’’ about subject. Glass was placed on a fabric-cover shelf inside a light tent. One light placed on each side of tent. The photographer was too lazy to iron the blue fabric in advance.
Question: Had I opted to use Chinese Five-Spice powder, would I have earned bonus points?
As far as I know, this is the first time I've donned plastic gloves and a breathing mask to work with the WPOTM theme. (No joke.)
Sure, I submitted the theme “Elemental” in Year One (wherein everyone shot a picture in which the element of their choice was the main subject). And yes, I did select Plutonium 239 for that one. But it’s a tribute to my unassailable manliness that I find it harmless. It’s that nasty green Kryptonite that induces paroxysm and pain in me. (Kal-El’s gustatory preferences aside, I’m pretty sure Kryptonite is not a spice. Cooks, help me out here.)
Anyway, I was working with eight spices in my picture—not including several others I rejected because they didn’t add anything to the grouping in the way of color or texture. Some spices are very odoriferous. Unless you see some logic I’m missing, eight glass bowls holding different spices significantly adds to the effect. As such, my nano-studio quickly became a kind of volatile olfactory mélange that brought to mind scenes from Frank Herbert’s Dune as well as an 18th century Paris brothel. (It’s better that you don’t ask me how I know this.)
To the more observant among you (which, I regret, is all of you), this is not the first time I have submitted a picture of something round or spherical. Sorry, I am very fond of both shapes, if only for the egalitarian way they treat any point along the line or surface, respectively. Every point is equidistant from the center. There's a fundamental, topological fairness about it.
Wow, am I off-topic. Again.
This was probably not the most creative submission I could/should have turned in. But it was kind of fun.
Our story so far: Shot at .4 sec.; f/36; ISO 1000; 18-55mm lens set at 55mm; aperture priority; center-weighted averaging; -1/3 EV; camera mounted on copy stand with front of lens approximate 30’’ about subject. Glass was placed on a fabric-cover shelf inside a light tent. One light placed on each side of tent. The photographer was too lazy to iron the blue fabric in advance.
Question: Had I opted to use Chinese Five-Spice powder, would I have earned bonus points?
Jerry-
I went on a search through our cupboards, looking for the most colorful spice on hand and settled on cinnamon. So I put a small mountain of cinnamon on a white plate - and saw I needed some help jazzing up the photo. Cinnamon sticks came to the rescue and added a bit of life to the photo.
The light was what came through the kitchen window which faced North. I've been so excited by "North Light" ever since a trip with Kevin and Byron to Gus Akerlund's studio in Cokato. Its simple and easy to work with. With the white balance of the camera set to auto, the tones were very weak. So I eventually set the balance to "shady" and thought that looked most real.
The camera was the D750 with 105 Micro Nikkor on a tripod. I've always been told that to go beyond f16 would be disaster but I needed more depth of field so I stopped it down to f40 - now I'm no longer afraid of small f-stops! Maybe if you only take photos of resolution charts, f22 and beyond are bad, in real life (spice life), it helps. Exposure was f40 @ 6/10 of a second, ISO 3200.
I went on a search through our cupboards, looking for the most colorful spice on hand and settled on cinnamon. So I put a small mountain of cinnamon on a white plate - and saw I needed some help jazzing up the photo. Cinnamon sticks came to the rescue and added a bit of life to the photo.
The light was what came through the kitchen window which faced North. I've been so excited by "North Light" ever since a trip with Kevin and Byron to Gus Akerlund's studio in Cokato. Its simple and easy to work with. With the white balance of the camera set to auto, the tones were very weak. So I eventually set the balance to "shady" and thought that looked most real.
The camera was the D750 with 105 Micro Nikkor on a tripod. I've always been told that to go beyond f16 would be disaster but I needed more depth of field so I stopped it down to f40 - now I'm no longer afraid of small f-stops! Maybe if you only take photos of resolution charts, f22 and beyond are bad, in real life (spice life), it helps. Exposure was f40 @ 6/10 of a second, ISO 3200.
Don-
for picture information I hope you will watch
https://youtu.be/PRsV_lnyxxI
Shot with a D810, 1/50th sec, f/10, ISO 100 and set at 70mm with a 24-70 mm Lens
for picture information I hope you will watch
https://youtu.be/PRsV_lnyxxI
Shot with a D810, 1/50th sec, f/10, ISO 100 and set at 70mm with a 24-70 mm Lens
Byron-
My submission is not action packed but I was going for a symmetrical pattern instead. I found 5 matching spoons, 5 spices of interesting colors (Himalayan Pink Sea Salt?) and a faux wood shelf. The lighting was provided by 1 Nikon SB700 shooting through a softbox. My camera doesn't have the built in Nikon Creative Lighting System so I have to use an SU800 to trigger the flash. It was set to the TTL mode. I used the 50mm lens set to f8. The camera was set to 1/60 sec at ISO 400.
My submission is not action packed but I was going for a symmetrical pattern instead. I found 5 matching spoons, 5 spices of interesting colors (Himalayan Pink Sea Salt?) and a faux wood shelf. The lighting was provided by 1 Nikon SB700 shooting through a softbox. My camera doesn't have the built in Nikon Creative Lighting System so I have to use an SU800 to trigger the flash. It was set to the TTL mode. I used the 50mm lens set to f8. The camera was set to 1/60 sec at ISO 400.
Deron-
When you sit down to watch one of your favorite movies, it this case, Denzel Washington's 'Man On Fire', you HAVE to have a bowl of popcorn. Popcorn alone is good, but to spice it up, I have to thrown on a little Tapatio!
When you sit down to watch one of your favorite movies, it this case, Denzel Washington's 'Man On Fire', you HAVE to have a bowl of popcorn. Popcorn alone is good, but to spice it up, I have to thrown on a little Tapatio!
Kevin-
When the Spice theme was announced I started, as many of us probably do at times, by researching photos of spice and spices via Google and other image search tools. And frankly, there were many wonderful images, with artfully arranged cups or bowls or spoons or other containers of various spices. Nice shots, but somehow they made me yawn.
So of course I started thinking about other uses of the word spice, whether it was in the phrase “That’s one spicy meatball” or in a name like “Spice Girls.” Nope, none of that did anything for me either.
Now when I think of spice I think of an explosion of flavor. So my mind started going that direction and felt that I was on to something. Realizing early that I know nothing about pyrotechnics, and not wanting federal authorities to wonder if they should “interview” me if I started researching the subject, I knew that I would need to create an explosion of spice by another method. So I settled on air pressure!
Discovering that my small shop vac could not only vacuum, but blow if the hose was attached to the air output instead, I rigged it up that way. Then drilled holes into the bottom of four plastic cups and inserted plastic tubing into each, which then attached to the backwards vacuum.
A new grocery store to the Twin Cities, Hy-Vee, sold spices and herbs by the ounce from bulk containers. So I went there and picked out four that looked like they might be interesting photographically, based on color and texture. Cilantro, Curry, Caraway and Tarragon. No, I can’t think of a single recipe that would use these four spices together. I chose them purely for their appearance, And yes, I understand that I wasn’t being careful to hew to Paul’s etymological distinction of spices vs herbs.
Cutting to the chase, I filled the cups with spices, turned on the vacuum and triggered the camera as the spices were propelled into the air.
Looking back though, perhaps I really should have hewn to Paul’s definition of spices, as unexpectedly to me, the curry looks more like an explosion than the herbs do. That’s what finally seeing the images on a screen can do as at the time I was shooting it was the curry that felt like a mistake.
Nikon D4s, tripod mounted, 105mm f/2.8 Micro Nikkor lens, three Nikon flash units. One in a small softbox above the cups of spices, and two behind the spices angling in to provide a bit of backlight. ISO 100, 1/250th of a second (flash sync) at f/11. The background was white, but far enough away from the light to appear grey as intended.
This would have been much stronger with one or two dozen different spices instead of four, but I knew that the shop vac wouldn’t have the grunt to do that. At least the good news was that after shooting I simply reversed the hose again and vacuumed everything up!
When the Spice theme was announced I started, as many of us probably do at times, by researching photos of spice and spices via Google and other image search tools. And frankly, there were many wonderful images, with artfully arranged cups or bowls or spoons or other containers of various spices. Nice shots, but somehow they made me yawn.
So of course I started thinking about other uses of the word spice, whether it was in the phrase “That’s one spicy meatball” or in a name like “Spice Girls.” Nope, none of that did anything for me either.
Now when I think of spice I think of an explosion of flavor. So my mind started going that direction and felt that I was on to something. Realizing early that I know nothing about pyrotechnics, and not wanting federal authorities to wonder if they should “interview” me if I started researching the subject, I knew that I would need to create an explosion of spice by another method. So I settled on air pressure!
Discovering that my small shop vac could not only vacuum, but blow if the hose was attached to the air output instead, I rigged it up that way. Then drilled holes into the bottom of four plastic cups and inserted plastic tubing into each, which then attached to the backwards vacuum.
A new grocery store to the Twin Cities, Hy-Vee, sold spices and herbs by the ounce from bulk containers. So I went there and picked out four that looked like they might be interesting photographically, based on color and texture. Cilantro, Curry, Caraway and Tarragon. No, I can’t think of a single recipe that would use these four spices together. I chose them purely for their appearance, And yes, I understand that I wasn’t being careful to hew to Paul’s etymological distinction of spices vs herbs.
Cutting to the chase, I filled the cups with spices, turned on the vacuum and triggered the camera as the spices were propelled into the air.
Looking back though, perhaps I really should have hewn to Paul’s definition of spices, as unexpectedly to me, the curry looks more like an explosion than the herbs do. That’s what finally seeing the images on a screen can do as at the time I was shooting it was the curry that felt like a mistake.
Nikon D4s, tripod mounted, 105mm f/2.8 Micro Nikkor lens, three Nikon flash units. One in a small softbox above the cups of spices, and two behind the spices angling in to provide a bit of backlight. ISO 100, 1/250th of a second (flash sync) at f/11. The background was white, but far enough away from the light to appear grey as intended.
This would have been much stronger with one or two dozen different spices instead of four, but I knew that the shop vac wouldn’t have the grunt to do that. At least the good news was that after shooting I simply reversed the hose again and vacuumed everything up!