January 14, 2012 - Pizza Night

January 14, 2012 - Pizza Night. We've been making home made pizza for a while now. CKB makes the dough, I do the topping and cooking. Tonight's came out pretty well - she had done some tuning with the dough, carefully logging the changes. This one was part sour dough and part normal yeast, plus was kneaded for an extended time on low in the mixer. As you can see it turned out nicely fluffy.

Photo notes - 5dII, 50mm lens, handheld. Used the 430ex flash, gelled with 1/4 CTO mounted on the camera, but bounced off the ceiling. Exposure is 1/60th at f/4.0, ISO 100. Tuned up slightly in Lightroom.

Critique: Nice rich colors - the pizza pretty much tasted as good as it looked. Didn't have to do too much post processing, filled the frame and there wasn't a whole lot of cropping possible. I'd have liked to have had a bit longer depth of field here, to get more of the pie in focus. The flash was on E-TTL so everything was pretty much program settings. Could have moved to manual, adjusted the exposure and thereby created a bit more depth and drama here. But, this was dinner, and it was hot and ready to serve, so I'll admit my priority wasn't 100% on taking the photo.

January 2, 2012 - This is the "product shot" for my Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Telephoto/Macro lens that I used to post the lens for sale online. I've had this lens for a few years and it has, quite frankly, been a shelf queen. There really isn't anything wrong with it, but it isn't a lens I've ever used a whole lot. My biggest gripe, if there is one, is that the focus is a bit slow. This is actually fine if you're shooting macro shots of things which aren't moving very fast, but isn't very conducive to getting sharp pictures in any sort of dynamic situation. I've probably shot fewer than 50 frames with this lens in the time I've had it. I still have the Canon 1.2 extension tube, which can be used to shoot macro, which is something I find I don't do that much.

Hopefully, it goes to a good home and I get a few dollars for more gear.

The picture was taken using available light plus flash. There is a bare incandescent directly above and a "daylight" compact florescent at camera left and back. Neither of these lights contributed much. The flash was again my 430EX II gelled with 1/4 CTO and bounced off of a handheld reflector. This is a very similar shot to yesterday's bread photo. I will admit that this was a quick shot and probably could have used better focus, composition and lighting. For the intended use, it is probably better than average. Best of all, it didn't take too much time to pull off.

January 1, 2012 - Home made bread from a recipe in the "Beard on Bread" cookbook. Didn't rise quite as much as I hoped, but turned out pretty well, none the less.

Photo was taken sitting on my stove - note the two parallel lines behind the bread. Photo was taken with a Canon 430EX speedlite mounted on the camera pointed to the right. I used the lid from the plastic bread box as a reflector, up and to the right. Flash was set to 1/16 power and gelled with 1/4 CTO. There is an under counter light just behind and to the left of the bread.

Couple things I'd adjust - first, the specular highlights off the stove in the background - either I need enough light to show what it is, or the reflections need to go. And, I'd adjust the DOF so that the whole face of the loaf was in focus.