Thanksgiving, Snow and Pie

Nikon D750 with 105 mm lens f4 @ 1/3200 ISO 800 

Nikon D750 with 105 mm lens f20 @ 1/160 ISO 800

Well, I had grand plans to take awesome food pictures during the Thanksgiving meal preparation and that just did not happen.  I tried. but I think you really need to prepare food with the intent of photographing it and not eating it to get it right.  It may not be as hard as photographing whiskey bottles but you really can't just point your camera at the food on the counter and get that magazine ad look.
As a backup plan, while Amy was preparing the bird for the oven, I took my camera outside to see what interesting shots I could get with our light dusting of snow (about an inch).
As I was finishing up I took a shot of this bush with snow balancing in a nice arch on the top of the

branches and my first shot had a background that was too distracting so I figured I would adjust and use this scene as a brief tutorial for my non-photography buff readers.  In order to achieve the shot at the top over the first one in the body of the blog I need to open the lens up to a smaller f-stop.  The thing to remember about f-stop is large numbers mean small lens openings and greater depth of field (more stuff is in focus).  The smaller numbers mean the lens is open more (letting in more light) and the depth of field is shallower.  The top shot for the

week was photographed at f4.0 with a shutter speed of 1/3200 second (ISO was at 800).  The second shot (which I took first) was at f20 and a shutter speed of 1/160.

Amy carefully measures the calories for the pecan pie.

Another thing to notice when intentionally defocusing the background of a picture is how that background looks when out of focus.
In photography speak this is referred to as bokeh.  Some lenses do a better job with this than others and top quality lenses tend to do much better than cheaper off-brand lenses.  These two pictures were shot with my 105 mm Nikkor macro lens.  This is a very good lens and the flat defocused background produced in this week's top photo is one of the many positive attributes of this lens.  The other close up snow scenes in this week's post also came from this lens.

Dan getting ready to eat the pecan pie.

This week's post would not be complete, however, with
out a few shots from the holiday festivities. The crowd at our house was very small and can only be considered a crowd in the old saying of two is company and three is a crowd.  Katie and Kristina both spent their Thanksgiving in California leaving us with just Doug for family.  We had a wonderful time with just the three of us and the best part is we get to split two pies among just three people.