Week 29 / Garden Fresh

August 15 – 21, 2011

The last two weeks I’ve posted photos from events that I’ve shot for clients.  While those photos can be cool, this week I wanted to shoot something that was a little more “organic”.  As I hoped, the perfect opportunity presented itself while picking tomatoes in the backyard.   We have no shortage of tomatoes…in fact it’s quite the opposite, and this overwhelming volume of tomatoes inspired my friend to make a fresh tomato sauce.   At this same time I had been taking photos of the garden and it only seemed right to shoot the sauce making process from start to finish.  I also thought it would be fun to challenge myself photographically by creating a few rules.  The first rule was to keep the same lens on the camera for every shot.  That lens was a basic 50mm prime lens…you cannot zoom in or out with a prime lens, it is a fixed focal length.  The next rule was to shoot “wide open.”  What this means is that aperture is set to the smallest number on the lens, in my case that was f/1.8.  What this does is create an extremely shallow depth of field, meaning the focus is very fine and particular.  The final rule (which actually came after I took the photos) was the square theme…because we don’t see enough square photos.

Yes, it was delicious!