Year In Pictures: 2010/03/18

[plonq]

Now that we have freezer space available in our upstairs refrigerator, we have ice cubes again. That means that I can start making Martinis again. Truth be told, I would be almost as happy skipping the Martini part and just eating the olives. Almost.

For the record, this one is made with two parts Tanqueray gin to one part dry Martini. Stirred, not shaken.



I tried a few different tricks with the lighting when I took this one. They all looked good in the camera, but I am glad that I persisted because it was the last shot that I liked the best. The backdrop is a black, felt-covered board that I made over a quarter of a century ago to serve as a die-rolling pad. After gathering dust out in the garage for many years, it has more recently found new life as a backdrop for photographs.

For this shot I turned off all of the lights and let the last vestiges of daylight trickling in the kitchen window do its magic.

I shot this with an aperture of f/6.7 at an exposure time of 30 seconds. Obviously I used a tripod. I colour-corrected it, cropped a tiny bit off the edges and balanced the lighting just a tad. Finally I applied a couple layers of conservative sharpening.

Comments

[pierrekrahn.livejournal.com]

So what advantage does a 30 second exposure have over a 1 second exposure? Or even 60 seconds?

[plonq.livejournal.com]

A long exposure time doesn't really give any advantage unless you are trying for some time-exposure effects, like light trails.

In the case of this shot, it was just a function of the lighting and the f/stop. I didn't want to have the aperture cranked wide open because I wanted a bit more depth of field.

If I had shot this at f/1.8 I could have done it on a much faster shutter speed, but most of the glass would have been out of focus, and I didn't want that for this shot. Unfortunately the light level in the kitchen was so low with the minimal daylight remaining that in order to crank up the f/stop a bit, and that meant I needed a very long exposure time.

[pfcottontail.livejournal.com]

It's no coincidence that the first letter in the word martini, is mmmmmmmm (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-_Kba6UZGI).