This week was a bit of a cop out, but I wanted to show some discipline and produce something anyway. So I baked some cookies and took pictures of those. I was not very organized when I went ingredients shopping, though, so the icing is white instead of yellow. Sorry.

I did try to do something more elaborate, and in fact I spent a couple of hours trying to set up a self-portrait. The results were terrible. I’m a terrible subject, for one thing, and I didn’t really have a pose thought through. I tried to get my cat involved, and he was having absolutely none of it. And I don’t have a wide-enough angle lens to get any really fun shots of him leaping out of the frame.

I had been meaning to do some baking, and I figured that taking pictures of food I’d made would qualify for a deliberately posed shot in which I’d given some thought to props. I’m glad I did this, because it reminded me of some simple things that I forget in observational photography but that are key when trying to control the contents of the frame.

One is the way light bounces, picking up color on the way. Compare the overall color of the ducks on the plate to that of the plate full of stars. The temperature is actually higher on the duck photo, but it still looks cooler just because of the blue background with the very different density of warm-colored cookies. This is something I “know” but didn’t think about until I looked at the EXIF data on these shots. It’s something I’d rather incorporate deliberately than fret over when color-correcting. Another is that it makes a huge difference if you wait a half hour or 45 minutes between shots when you are using natural light. Again, this is something I know and would rather use actively than “remember” when I’m selecting shots I’ve just pulled of a CF card.

Also, if I’m serious about doing some nice, clean shots for this project, I really have to get an iron.