plonq | Year In Pictures: 2010/09/11

This may look like a pumpkin to you, but to me it is a blank canvas. I see a pie, or tarts, or even soup. The sugar pumpkins are showing up in force at the farmers' market, and I intend to put our new freezer to good use this year. Also unlike last year when I just dumped all of the roasted pumpkin puree into a big glom in the freezer, I am going to portion these ones out into bags or containers with known quantities in each (3-cups or something reasonable like that).

I shot this one by putting the camera on the same surface as the pumpkin, with a small brochure stuck under the front of the camera to raise it just a bit. I set the self-timer and then shot this one at f/18.0 with a shutter speed of 13 seconds. The nice diffuse lighting is because I closed the blinds for the shot (hence the long shutter time). I set the aperture small to bring out the details in the pumpkin, but it also brought out all the background details in sharp focus - including that shoe box. The box is a brilliant red, and it was dominating the picture. I managed to fix it by creating a gradient overlay over the whole picture, clearing it, and then painting it back over the red part of the shoebox. I left the white part of the box and the lettering in colour so that it would not be so apparent (like it was on yesterday's shot) that I had converted some of the background to black and white.