Chocolate

I love love love good chocolate.  Like, the expensive kind that costs like $20 a pound.  After you taste these chocolates every other chocolate you have ever eaten reminds you of garbage/candle wax.  Occasionally, when we have a holiday or special occasion in my family, we will go and get a pound of See's candies.  What I like to do is go to the store, take the menu outside, circle all of the chocolates that I would like to get, and go in and order the chocolate - I get a little giddy (kid in a candy shop?).

We had a pound of See's a few weeks ago and I knew that we were going to be photographing food in advanced photography as well as the theme "food" for the month of May in photo club, so I decided that these little chocolates would be delightful little subjects.

A couple lessons learned on this shoot.  1) Lighting always matters,  but it really mattered on this shoot.  I had a huge range of exposures and the way the light hits the chocolate really makes a difference on the "food photography - does this food look tasty" scale. 2) Depth of field - I was up close and personal with these chocolates but that made a key difference in my area of sharpness - a few great photos turn out to be just the teensiest bit not sharp enough.  I needed to back up a little bit because my aperture had to be open as wide as possible considering the light in the room - maybe that would have provided me with a tad more area of focus. 3) I need to go buy some chocolate.  Like today.

And my personal favorite:

Heber Valley Railroad

My son LOVES trains. When he first started talking about them he called them "fuh fuhs" (like choo choo - said in a high-pitch voice)...which has evolved into "choo choo crane." Parenting Mistake: We told him that we were going to go visit Thomas the train the next day as we were putting him to bed.  Unfortunately he got so excited to go see the train that he was unable to fall asleep...for the next few hours. It was really cute for a few minutes. :)

I was excited to take Dean to see the train and also to bring my camera and take some landscape pictures out of the window of the train as we circled the reservoir up the Provo canyon.  It was about an hour drive for us to get to the train (which left at 3pm) and by the time we got there Dean was asleep.  So I spent my few extra minutes taking some shots of the outside of the train, tracks and station.  I did some more experimental editing with these shots and especially love the vintage feel of the black and white shots - a train seem like the perfect subject for that type of edit.  I love having enough light to where I can close up my aperture, set the shutter to what I want, ISO 100 and just shoot with no thought of compromising on quality or depth of field or whatever.  It's a great feeling!