The great thing about being married to a chef and caterer is that I usually have food available to shoot. That is, if I make it to her kitchen. Unfortunately, Carla’s usually cooking when I’m at work, and the food is gone by the time I’m able to get to her kitchen. Tonight was different, though. She’s preparing for a big  job on Saturday in Charlottesville, and is working out of a different [much larger] kitchen that happens to be near my office. I stopped by after work this evening to take some “Carla in the kitchen” shots for her. Between snapping shots for her, I admittedly was scrounged around for food to capture. It just so happened that she had a nice amount of fresh peas and asparagus on hand.

One of the great things about visiting a new kitchen is all the different and/or new equipment. The double-basket deep fryer kept calling me.

My muse.

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Luddite Watch

For those keeping pace with my progress on the image editing front; I still haven’t made it over to Penn Camera to pick up my copy of Nikon Capture NX 2. I ran these photos through Picasa, and performed minimal sharpening and shadow/highlight adjustment. I have made a point to now shoot all my images in both RAW and JPG formats. I’ll be interested to see the difference between a processed JPG image versus a processed RAW image. You can be sure that I will post a comparison post with before-and-after shots once I get Capture.

food, macro, portraiture

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Ok. I decided that I need to get with it and join the ranks of those using a more powerful post-processing program. After doing some research, (okay “some” may be an understatement) I decided on Nikon’s Capture NX 2. Well, I haven’t actually purchased the program yet.  I’ll knock that out within a few days.  In the interim, I thought it would be helpful to pick up a user guide to get a jump on grasping the program before I start to use it. (So often, the manuals that come with products are not particularly useful.) After poking around this evening, I read a lot of good things about Jason Odell’s NX 2 guide. A few clicks later, I downloaded this handy guide in pdf format.

The sheer size of the guide didn’t really hit home until I started to print it out. What the…? It’s 401 pages!  I mean, come on. Really? This is not ameliorating my feelings toward post-processing. Do I really want to sink my teeth into something that takes 400 pages to explain?

I know that I am being a bit stubborn about this aspect of digital photography, so I intend to look at this as an opportunity to move out of my comfort zone and learn something new.  In fact, learning how to use an image post-processing program will join my attempt to master web design and blogging as challenges I’m tackling this year. I suspect that within a month or so, I will be back here singing the “I don’t know how I lived without this” song. Until then…401 pages.

I want to be clear that I’m not attacking Jason Odell. Based on all that I’ve read, Odell has packed this guide chock full of useful information. Here’s hoping that I  exercise the patience to absorb and utilize Odell’s instruction, and only need one pair of contact lenses to get through it.

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