Tag Archives: Photography
Food blogging
Karma challenged us to photograph our meals for a week. You’d think that would be easy, but it turned out to be quite the challenge. Who remembers to photo dinner before shoveling it in after a day at work? So I have, over the course of two weeks, taken photos of some of my more favorite meals. And, because I had a huge family meal right in the middle of the two weeks, you’ll get to see some food that only shows itself once a year. Enjoy!
At the beginning of the challenge we had just cooked a ham, and I was looking for something to do with the leftovers. My cousin suggested escaloped potatoes and they turned out wonderful! I didn’t get a photo of the finished product, but I did them in the crock pot and they were spectacular.
The wine didn’t go into the potatoes…but it was good.
Then later that week I did crock pot stew. See a theme here?
Good on a cold night after a long day.
Then it was time to get ready for the big dinner. Two of my favorite things to make are do ahead mashed potatoes….
Yukon gold, cream cheese & sour cream.
…and orange cranberry sweet potatoes that can also be done the day before. Both just get heated up the day of the meal, leaving you less stressed and more available to your guests.
You’ve got to try this one. Easy and amazing.
But the star of our big meal was the rib roast.
Yummy!
We had a wonderful time, and ate leftovers for a couple of days.
No we don’t eat like this every day!
After that we settled down to more normal meals. I forgot to take pictures of the night we ate hamburgers….or the night we went out to eat at a local eatery and I had chicken with dried Michigan cherries. Or the night we wolfed down a frozen pizza. After I heated it up.
I did remember to document the night we had scrambled eggs…which I thought would be boring, so I added sauteed onions, leftover ham, and cheese. Filling and quick.
Who says eggs are only for breakfast?
And Saturday night we had marinated chicken (you can buy it already marinated or marinate it yourself in Italian dressing for an hour or so), more onions (you can never go wrong with onions!), stuffing bought already prepared from the grocery store (Bob Evans) and peas. Pretty darn good and fast.
No leftovers.
So there you go….a week or so of meals. Oh. What did we have for desert? Well. We definitely didn’t take time to photograph that before we ate it. But it involved chocolate.
Thanks Karma, for making me think more about what we eat. AND for picking a perfect couple of weeks when I was really cooking. Versus any other two week period of the year when you’d see a lot more of this.
Healthy and fast. Perfect.
If anyone wants to recipes to any of this let me know. It’s all easy. Trust me on that.
Wordless Wednesday – icy naptime.
Resting. Or not.
The big Dinner is over. I’ve cleaned and cooked and dished and served and cleaned up after. I’ve got today off work, otherwise I would collapse in exhaustion. On the other hand…I don’t want to waste this day sleeping. Or vacuuming. So I’m taking the camera and heading out. An adventure for one.
Cause you never know what you’ll find.
Food photo challenge
Karma’s blog has challenged us to photograph our meals for a week. Or parts of our meals on some days. Certainly not all our meals…I mean how interesting can cereal look. Oh wait. Pretty interesting actually. But anyway, Karma is giving us until Jan 13 to put together a blog about the food we eat. You might want to go over to her blog to read the real rules as the above was only a representation of the truth.
This turns out to be a good time for food photography, given I’ll have a few days off and I have the big family dinner next weekend, so there will be lots of food prep opportunities. I wouldn’t want you to think we eat this well every week. Most of the time my husband is reduced to foraging for food either from the back of the fridge or some local eatery. And I bet there will still be a fair share of that between now and January 13.
Regardless, you MIGHT get to see a few of my favorite things to cook and/or bake. You never know. I’m hoping some or all of you will join in. As we move on into January let’s share what we use as healthy or comfort (or both) food!
Yum.
The pond – a twelve month study
Inspired by Sara who is documenting the gulch behind her home, I decided last January to take a photo of the neighbor’s pond on the first Saturday of each month. I’ve posted January through April, and then May through August. Yesterday was the first Saturday in December, so this morning I took the last photo. I’d been hoping for snow so that the December photo would look different from the November photo, but I won’t complain about the 50 degree weather we’re enjoying.
So here is the pond as it looked on the first Saturday all year long. Remember to click on any photo to see more details.
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Quiet weekend
We spent the weekend working on projects around the house, taking care of a neighbor’s cat while they were out of town and taking advantage of unseasonably warm weather to put up outdoor Christmas lights.
It was nice.
Early morning peace.
This weekend was the calm before the holiday storm. Crazy people are camping outside retails stores to be the first shoppers on Black Friday…and some stores are even opening on Thanksgiving night. As usual I will not be in those lines, nor shopping for things no one needs. I’ll be spending next weekend with siblings; goofing off, cooking, taking walks up mountains, pictures and naps.
If you’re spending next Friday shopping for stuff….well…enjoy. To each his own.
And I do appreciate your efforts to turn our economy around. Yes I do.
November blues
I went out on a cold rainy grey November day to find something for Scott’s color composition challenge. The day before had been warm and sunny but I didn’t venture out with the camera. Too obvious and too sensible.
One of the articles Scott provided for reference talked about the meaning of color, how you can sometimes use color to set a mood for a photo. I guess I’ve been feeling kind of sad that the summer has ended and winter is right around the corner, because every bit of color I found that day was blue. I’m not saying that the blue in each photo set the mood for the photo…just that it was what I noticed on this day. (Click on the picture to see the details.)
My first stop was at a historic church. I pass this church every Tuesday on my to and from band rehearsal and I’ve never noticed it. At our last rehearsal I saw with shock that someone had painted the front door and knew I had to come back with a camera.
The color composition challenge was a perfect excuse to stop and get that shot. I started out focusing on the door itself, then tried to get the steeple and the door in the frame. But as I walked back to the car I looked back and knew the whole church needed to be included – because the transformation of the door only worked when it was shown against the disrepair of the entire building. I placed the door near the intersection of the rule of thirds lines.
Historic Presbyterian Church gets a small facelift.
Continuing on with my errands I passed an old schoolhouse that has been painted many many times. Long after the last schoolchild left it was run as a restaurant and catering business, but that closed years ago and now it sits empty. Through the rain I noticed the bell tower with it’s multiple layers of paint showing a bit of it’s history. Again the blue caught my eye, and I tried to have it take up 2/3rds of the image.
Years of schoolhouse colors.
And as I made my way home I noticed the local ski hill. No snow yet, but there was more blue. I had to climb down a muddy hill and ruined a pair of shoes to get this. But I really enjoyed the way the blue ski lift moves from the lower left and climbs up to the upper right of the shot, reflecting the angle of the hill.
Ready for the ski season.
Yep, it was a blue kind of day. But I can’t say that was all due to fall moving into winter. After all I found this blue last spring at my local nursery.
Blue pots
Color composition photo challenge.
Scott has issued his latest challenge…to work color into a photo as a composition element. I think back to a summer challenge from Karma that was all about color, but now here it is November in Michigan. Where to find that pop of color that deliberately pulls the eye?
I could go into the archives and see what there is. Surely in the Albuquerque photos there would be something.
Or along our great lakes?
Anything?
But no, this is about challenging us to consciously use color in a composition. I need to look around and see what I can find. The assignment is due Wednesday the 21st of November. Go read more at Scott’s blog right away!
Jump on in…the color’s wonderful!
