plonq | Year In Pictures: 2010/08/01

This spring we bought a book on small-batch canning, and over the past week we have been putting that to use. This afternoon we set to canning some of the stuff we bought at the farmers' market on Saturday.

atara canned three one-pint jars of sliced, sweet pickles (not pictured here), and three jars of dilly beans (seen in the background). She used three different colours of beans; green, yellow and purple. Alas, the purple ones lost their colour in the canning process, so her efforts of colour-coordinating the beans as they went into the jars were for naught. Trust me, they looked quite striking - though I think they are still an attractive arrangement.

In front is a 1-litre mason jar of sweet pickled beets; my handiwork for the day. It would have been nice to have enough beets to do a second jar, but this was a learning experience. At least the lids all popped nicely like they were trying to seal, but I guess we'll know tomorrow if they sealed properly or not.

Given the choice I'd have arranged these differently for the shot, but

atara threatened me with physical violence if I disturbed the jars in any way, and she's so overheated and grumpy right now that I believe her. As with all pictures taken under those CF lights in the kitchen, the colour balance was a bit of a nightmare. I have over-compensated in the past and pushed the pictures way too far into the blue, so if things look a bit too yellow in this shot, it is because I was very conservative with my colour tweaking.

I shot this one at f/9.5 and a shutter speed of 6 seconds. Other than the colour tweak, I did a bit of sharpening, and notched the saturation up a bit.