A few quick peeks into Muddy’s Menu Photos, Part II!
(that last one an explosion of creativity from Kat and Kip. Gordon Super Powers, Activate!)
Another day filled with nearly a dozen cakes and a dozen cupcake varieties, not to mention pies, cookies and bars – and we’re not done yet, folks! So I’ll be posting more sneaky peeks from the photo shoots, PLUS I’ll have behind the scenes photos taken on film which might make a guest appearance on the blog. In other words: more to come!
Pentax K20D • Pentax SMCP-FA 50mm f/1.4
My love for pumpkin-related baked goods cannot be contained to just the months when pumpkin is technically in season or traditionally used for cooking. It’s nearly August, and in the Mid-South region of the U.S., the heat indexes are in the triple digits. I am hoping that a pumpkin pie -though out of season- will help usher in thoughts of autumn with its crispy air, its clear blue skies, and the cozy scarves I like to wear when it comes ’round.
If not, at least it’ll be autumn for my TASTE BUDS, right??
Sometimes, I get so caught up in piping fancy swirls of icing on cupcakes for aesthetic purposes, that I forget that there can be beauty in simplicity.
It’s been awhile since I’ve done a Bokeh Wednesday, but here it goes:
Since I’ve had my Pentax K20D, I have really been missing the ability to do macro shots. For my Nikon D50 (my previous dSLR) and my Nikon film cameras, I have something called macro extension tubes to do close-up work. I mainly use this type of photography for my food photos, but it occasionally comes in handy in other areas as well. Essentially these extension tubes screw onto your lens, and create a distance between the film plane (or in the case of digital, the image sensor) and it causes the lens to focus more closely than normal (there is a more scientific explanation for this, but I am not well-versed in science or mathematics. Alls I know is that the tubes work!) You can stack tubes of different heights together to make your lens focus closer and closer – and it can get REAL close, folks, if you use more than one tube. I generally don’t do this because it’s just not my thang. However, macro tubes have really defined my food photography (there I go again, giving away my secrets…) I love ’em. Both my new Pentax-mount tubes and the ones I used on my Nikon bodies (which, incidentally, were designed for a whole nother lens mount called m42 which I have an adapter to make fit on Nikon, but that’s another topic for another day) are manual focus, generic tubes. They’re cheap as chips. I paid around $10 for the m42 tubes and abotu $12 for the new ones I just got for the Pentax.
I thought I should bake something to show off/test out the new tubes. I made pumpkin muffins. I even tried out my new snowflake silicone muffin “tin” (not really a tin since it’s not metal, eh?) I sprinkled some powdered sugar on top to add interest for the photo. I say the new extension tubes work pretty well! This was taken with the shortest tube attached – I told you it’ll get ridiculously close if you put on more than one. Look how close just the shortest one got us!
Of course, the more closely you focus on something, the more shallow the depth of field is going to be. That means with extension tubes, your depth of field is going to be WHOA shallow. You’d have to really close your aperture down to get much in focus. I don’t want too much in focus, so I keep my aperture pretty wide for this stuff.
So that’s it for this Bokeh Wednesday. Shallow depth of field AND pumpkin muffins? Mmmmm. Doesn’t get much better than that!