This exercise is to set ones self an assignment and photograph it, an objective not dissimilar to that of Assignment 5 . As I wish to use a forthcoming holiday to South Africa as subject matter for Assignment 5, I thought a simpler topic would be appropriate for this exercise.
My wife came up with the idea of her baking some buns; by coincidence one example suggested in the course notes. I was keen also to build on my indoors photographic expertise, following on from the later exercises and assignment in Chapter 4.
I used a 25-105mm lens fixed to a Canon 450d body on a tripod. Lighting was supplied by tungsten room light and Speedlite 430EX II flash attached by cable. Additional lighting was supplied by Micro Lite on a few images.
My wife has some recipes handed down over generations - for this exercise she chose raspberry buns, a recipe handed down from her grandmother. The main ingredients are flour, eggs, margarine and of course some jam, albeit she used blackcurrant conserve as opposed to raspberry jam!
I spent some time thinking about how to encapsulate the narrative in between 5 and 15 images. I took nearly 30 images and selected down to 15; more could have been posted here, but that is not the brief and I considered it important to stay within the brief as in practice it might be that 5-15 is the commission one receives.
Set out below is the narrative, with appropriate captions:
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| Looking through the handwritten book for Grandma's recipe |
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| This is it! |
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| Contemporary technology used to convert the ounces to grams |
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| Warm the oven ready |
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| Ingredients laid out in a deliberately posed shot |
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| Sieving the flour into the bowl |
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| Weighing the margarine |
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| Washing hands - an important part of the narrative to show proper procedures used |
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| Ruubbing in the flour, margarine, sugar and salt |
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| Penultimate ingredient is the egg |
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| Low technology method of mixing in the egg |
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| Kneading the mixture - used a different camera angle to capture texture |
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| Preparation for the last ingredient.... |
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| ....the jam! |
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| The end result - a nice pattern picture. Allowed pattern to continue beyond the frame as per Chapter 2. |
This was a fun exercise to do although probably not good enough for an assignment. I think possibly there is too little variety between the images.
I must also own up to not thinking through the technical points well enough; there were several other well conceived shots that could not use as part of image as out of focus - I simply took too many images using f4. It is low light but smaller apertures were possible with the available lighting As it turned out, there were plenty of acceptable images for this exercise but the lesson is learnt.
Two other lessons learnt:
- the need to plan even a simple exercise like this well;
- keep calm - my wife got agitated a couple of times because the framing took a long time (the whole exercise took two hours). Some expectation management is required.
