In early September--the time you are talking about-- have you usually had frost. I don't think you would have, but most annuals bought in the spring would be well past their prime. The exceptions would be Impatiens for the shade and Geraniums for the sun. They just get better looking as the season goes on. Both these are not actually annuals, but tender perennials, and put on a good show. Be sure to deadhead the geraniums, but the Impatiens don't need it. Plant some asters this spring. You could start these from seed--they grow all summer and bloom in the fall. You could ask a greenhouse to plant some annuals later for you so the plants are at their peak then. The Mums will be coming out at that time so fill in any spaces with them. I hope you have a nice time at your daughter's wedding. This is a joyous time in a parents life

Posted by canarybird (My Page) on Wed, Jul 15, 09 at 18:24 FOOD PHOTO TIPS: Part 2 - Lighting & White Balance Hi everyone! For those who are learning to use their cameras, I hope you are still interested in my little tutorials. As I mentioned previously, I'm recounting only what I've learned or read in the past years while playing with my cameras. But I hope I can help those who haven't had the chance to experiment as much as I have and who are still struggling with the manual. So let's go once more to look at setting up by a window in daylight. I'm continuing with the numbering of photo examples in case I need to refer back to any one of them by number. Side Lighting - Daylight To continue with indoor daylight exposures, let's move the tripod around to the side and see how the subject looks with a light from the window, coming from the left side...(tomatoes and peach haven't shrivelled yet thank heavens). That's also a very beautiful lighting and it has been seen in many paintings of old masters, such as the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (remember Girl with the Pearl Earring) where he creates mood magic with light falling from a left window onto household objects and people. We may need a little practice to get the same effect but here you see the highlight on the left side of the tomatoes in the LCD screen Fig. 9. At this moment the camera is in PORTRAIT mode which is found on the SCENE menu with the icon of a girl's head. Portrait mode is meant for capturing subjects that are fairly close to the camera ....imagine someone sitting on a chair in front of you and you are going to take their portrait. In some, if not most digital cameras, portrait mode has a slight warming effect which is meant to enhance skin tones. So it can also be good for taking food shots. If you are without a tripod, hold the camera firmly and brace your elbows against your sides, remembering to press the shutter button halfway to let the camera focus, then smoothly press the rest of the way down. Fig. 10 shows a short tripod good for tabletop photos. At this short distance, there will be some slight distortion of the subject. If my table were a little longer I would probably move the camera back a little and zoom in. Fig. 11 shows the same with a piece of white paper at the right to reflect light onto the dark side. You can see the difference it makes in Fig. 12 where the paper was removed. Look especially at the plate underneath the bowl. Where it is bright in the first photo, it is shadowy in the second. I would need a taller piece of white board or foam to be sure and get the bright reflection on the contents of the bowl as well, although you do see some light reflected on the tomato. Since the camera is so near to the subject I would stay in PORTRAIT mode and add an option to the camera setting by clicking on my TULIP ICON which activates MACRO. (Have I scared you with this?) Sorry. Macro can come later then, but if you have seen that little tulip on the back of your camera,.... well as long as you know that it's for taking closeup photos. It can usually be added in to most other camera settings.Fig. 13 shows the photo the camera took at that position on the tabletop tripod. WHITE BALANCE or WB You may have seen WB or AWB somewhere on your camera menu as you were searching for something else. It's a pretty important part of setting up your camera for taking photos in all light conditions. Nowadays however digital cameras are pretty smart and with SCENE modes, the manufacturers have tried to think of every possible photo situation you may have, from night shots and fireworks to cuisine and have programmed those settings into the camera. However nothing can equal the human eye and cameras sometimes misjudge the type of light in a scene. That's why as well as the always present AUTO, you have adjustable options for telling the camera what type of light you have. Fig. 14 shows the window setup using a normal tripod and the camera in Portrait mode. I'm going to take some photos to demonstrate WHITE BALANCE. In Fig. 15 you see what comes up after I press the MENU option on my little Olympus Stylus 800. You see the letters WB as the bottom option. Pressing the bottom button would bring up the White Balance menu. Fig. 16 shows that WB menu open on my other camera, and there you see there are seven options to choose from. (Oops....you can see my messy desk.) AUTO - not hard to figure that out. You let the camera decide what the light temperature is... (warm to cool). SUNNY - with a sun icon, this is one outdoor setting to choose when you have sun and want to be sure the camera knows that. CLOUDY - with a cloud icon, this option is also for overcast skies but is nice to use indoors by a window like this one when the light is not too strong. I nearly always take my food photos indoors by a window with CLOUDY as the white balance setting. BULB - with a light bulb icon, this is the setting to use under an incandescent, standard light bulb. Failure to use this setting in evening photos under lamplight will result in the photo having an orange hue. Using it in daylight will give a strong blue cast to your picture. FLUORESCENT 1, 2 & 3 - If you've seen and wondered what these centipede icons are on your camera, now you know. Someone had the bright (no pun intended) idea that a fluorescent bulb icon should look like this. Well whatever, we have to accept that it represents fluorescent bulbs. There are three on my cameras, denoting different temperatures of fluorescent bulbs. I find that the first is warm and adds a nice cosy glow to a photo, despite that it may be daylight with no light bulb in sight. The second appears more neutral and the third adds a mauve cast to a photo. I'm speaking now of a comparison of the effects that setting has in a daylight situation. If you are in an office or shop where there is fluorescent lighting, you could perhaps find your white balance menu and try out those three options. The nice thing is that you can see the difference in your viewfinder while you scroll through them before taking a photo. AWB...stand for auto white balance, which you may see on a screen or in a menu. I've taken some photos to demonstrate these differences in white balance. I will leave the first seven as thumbnails. But you see as they are a little darker, the differences in the colour temperatures of the WB settings are quite pronounced. They follow the order of my list above, starting with AUTO and ending with FLUORESCENT 3. You see the heavy blue of photo 4 in both series. That's the result of using the incandescent bulb setting when you are actually photographing with daylight. It's the correct setting however for under a lightbulb when no daylight is present. 1. Auto 2. Sunny 3. Cloudy 4. Incandescent lightbulb 5. Fluorescent 1 (warm) 6. Fluorescent 2 (neutral) 7. Fluorescent 3 (mauve cast) The next series of seven photos are full size, with the camera setup just as in Fig. 14, using a white paper SWEEP (that comes later) as a seamless background. I've also increased the EV ...( exposure value or exposure compensation) a little to brighten the pictures and give the 'heavenly' effect to the backlight. (EV comes later too...don't get scared.) Since I've raised the exposure value (opened up the lens a bit more) the following photos are quite bright and the differences in the white balance is not so noticeable: Well I hope this hasn't been too much at once. If so, please just ask me to slow down or explain anything that's not clear. Next time we'll get into lighting by artificial light, how to use a sweep (other than a broom) and correcting the exposure to lighten or darken your photos with a push of your finger on the EV button. Until then, thanks for joining me. I'll have the next instalment ready soon. Sharon (Canarybird) (All text and photos copyrighted) Follow-Up Postings: o RE: Food Photo Tips: Part 2 - Lighting & White Balance clip this post email this post what is this? see most clipped and recent clippings * Posted by shaun (My Page) on Wed, Jul 15, 09 at 20:58 You are incredible!!! o RE: Food Photo Tips: Part 2 - Lighting & White Balance clip this post email this post what is this? see most clipped and recent clippings * Posted by trsinc (My Page) on Wed, Jul 15, 09 at 21:02 What shaun said!! Thank you so much for all of the time and effort you put in to these posts, Sharon. Very generous of you!!! :-) o RE: Food Photo Tips: Part 2 - Lighting & White Balance clip this post email this post what is this? see most clipped and recent clippings * Posted by deborah_ps (My Page) on Wed, Jul 15, 09 at 22:18 I've had company for the past month and so have been unable to check in until today...what a treat to see your tutorials Sharon :) I'll be off to the Caribbean this Friday and your lessons will certainly help! Gracias :) o RE: Food Photo Tips: Part 2 - Lighting & White Balance clip this post email this post what is this? see most clipped and recent clippings * Posted by sooz (My Page) on Wed, Jul 15, 09 at 22:52 Totally awesome and sooooo helpful and step-by-step (that's how I learn!). Thank you!!!!!! :O) Sooz o RE: Food Photo Tips: Part 2 - Lighting & White Balance clip this post email this post what is this? see most clipped and recent clippings * Posted by momto4kids (My Page) on Thu, Jul 16, 09 at 9:53 I've been threatening to take a photography class, but no one gives a class way out where I live! This is SOOOOO perfect and completely addresses my needs! Sharon, you are so patient and so amazing! I feel like you're talking directly to me in terms I can totally understand. I am very grateful. I cannot wait to put it into practice! o RE: Food Photo Tips: Part 2 - Lighting & White Balance clip this post email this post what is this? see most clipped and recent clippings * Posted by canarybird (My Page) on Sun, Jul 19, 09 at 13:05 Thanks everyone...I'm glad you're finding it easy to follow. The next one will be about using a sweep (seamless paper backdrop) and how to correct the lighting with the EV button. I think that will be enough for one time, so taking photos under artificial light will come after that. Back soon, SharonCb :-) o RE: Food Photo Tips: Part 2 - Lighting & White Balance clip this post email this post what is this? see most clipped and recent clippings * Posted by kathleen_li (My Page) on Mon, Jul 20, 09 at 0:26 Thank you, Sharon! You are a wonderful teacher! Monique told me about the macro, never knew it was there!

Posted by canarybird (My Page) on Wed, Jul 22, 09 at 14:41 FOOD PHOTO TIPS : Part 3 - Lighten or Darken Your Photos with EV Hi everyone! I'm back again with another chapter of hints on how to use your digital camera for taking tabletop photos. I hope everything so far has been easy to understand. But I'll be going over and repeating some things as well so they're not forgotten or misunderstood. For those who are unfamiliar with this very useful item, I want to introduce the EV function on your camera. EV stand for Exposure Value and the button or menu option is called the Exposure Compensation, or Exposure Bias. Here's the icon, which is a square with plus and minus signs inside. You may find this icon stamped on the arrow pad on the back of your camera as in Fig, 17. When that upper arrow is pressed, it produces a new icon in the top right corner of the LCD screen as in Fig. 18, where a black rectangle shows 0.0 and two blue right/left arrows. That tells you that you are now able to use the EV function, and by pressing the right and left sides of the arrow pad you will either increase or decrease the value which will appear in that top right corner of the screen. The increments go up to plus or minus 2 in steps of 1/3 or 1/2. Example: +0.3, +0.7, +1.0 etc. up to +2 (or minus when using that arrow pad.) So for what is that used? In short, you can manually lighten or darken the picture you see in the viewfinder before shooting by using this setting. Sometimes when your subject is dark against a bright background, the light meter adjusts the overall setting for the brightness, leaving your subject too dark. In that case you would (on my camera here) press the right side of the arrow pad as in Fig. 18a. Now you see the number in the top right screen corner has changed to +0.3 to brighten the picture. If I were happy with that, I would then press the OK button in the centre of the arrow pad and then press the shutter to take the picture. If I wanted the picture to be lighter still, I would press the arrow pad twice instead of once, which would give me +0.7. In the case where the overall picture was too bright and the subject was going to look lighter than I would like, then I'd press the left arrow and that would give me a minus value, darkening the photo Fig. 18b. You can get some very lovely effects with a -0.3 setting, especially outdoors where it is often so bright that your photos can look a little overexposed. I keep my cameras set at -0.3 for nearly all my outdoor photos. And my daughter was very pleased when I told her about that when she was getting used to a new camera. Her garden photos turned out so much better with the EV set to -0.3 on bright days. And some closeup flower photos can look quite dramatic at this setting. Here is where I find the EV option on my little pocket Stylus. By pressing the main menu in the centre of the back arrow pad I get these four options in Fig. 19. On this camera one presses the top and bottom arrows to lighten or darken the picture. Fig. 20. In Fig. 21 you see the EC has been set to +0.7. I show the example of this second camera only to illustrate that you may have to look in more than one place to find the EV function on your camera. I was setting up to illustrate the differences in EV settings and found another good use for a small bag of dry catfood! Fig. 22. Together with a clothespeg and a sheet of white paper it makes an idea reflector for the small object on the table. I changed my mind and used some orange poster paper as a backdrop for the following photos. So here we go with some examples of how a picture looks when taken at different EV values, ranging from 0.0 in Fig. 23 up to +0.1 in Fig. 26. Fig. 27 is back at 0.0 and Fig. 28 to 30 are minus steps increasingly dark. Click on photos to enlarge. Sorry I see that the Fig. numbers are only visible when you click on the below photos to enlarge them. The first and the fifth are without an EV adjustment. You can read the EV value in the clicked enlargements. (I do love those dark ones!) I just went outside and took some examples with our clerodendrom which was still in partial sunlight. I started with the first example without using any Exposure Compensation and took samples at different minus values of EV. I didn't include them all here but with these five you can see the difference between no adjustment in the first and six steps in the minus scale to -2.0, which is a little too dark. However I do like the effect at -1.0 and -1.3. All photos on this page were taken using the PORTRAIT setting in the SCENE option. Remember that the icon for portrait is a girl's head. The indoor photos had a WHITE BALANCE setting of "cloudy". I hope you will be able to give some of these options a tryout. You can do a lot to correct lighting when using automatic settings by making an adjustment with the EV function. I have the next chapter ready but I think this is enough for one day. It is a fun one....how to use a paper sweep for seamless backgrounds. Really easy! Please ask if anything isn't clear. If I know the answer I'll be back with a reply. Until then, thanks for joining me. I'll be uploading the next instalment soon. And please feel free to save the pages on your computer. Sharon (Canarybird) (All text and photos copyrighted) Free for personal, non-commercial use Follow-Up Postings: o RE: Food Photo Tips: Part 3 - Lighten or Darken Photos with EV clip this post email this post what is this? see most clipped and recent clippings * Posted by loves2cook4six (My Page) on Wed, Jul 22, 09 at 17:13 Sharon THANK YOU for these great tutorials. We are on vacation but I hope to do some experimenting with my camera's settings. I've been to scared to move off AUTO but you are inspiring me to take some "risks" lol o RE: Food Photo Tips: Part 3 - Lighten or Darken Photos with EV clip this post email this post what is this? see most clipped and recent clippings * Posted by canarybird (My Page) on Thu, Jul 23, 09 at 5:34 You're welcome loves2cook and I hope you will also try new settings while taking some vacation photos as well. Have a good rest of your holiday! SharonCb o RE: Food Photo Tips: Part 3 - Lighten or Darken Photos with EV clip this post email this post what is this? see most clipped and recent clippings * Posted by shaun (My Page) on Fri, Jul 24, 09 at 22:20 Thank you!!!!! o RE: Food Photo Tips: Part 3 - Lighten or Darken Photos with EV clip this post email this post what is this? see most clipped and recent clippings * Posted by momto4kids (My Page) on Wed, Jul 29, 09 at 10:21 Sharon, Just when I thought I'd have time to be a regular at CF again...my time gets zapped up so quickly. I wanted you to know I am thoroughly enjoying these posts! I am having a great time figuring out what you're saying with my own camera. My pictures have already improved remarkably. I've been begging (okay, whining) to take some classes and they just aren't to be found around here. Your tutorials are just what I need! Thank you for all your time! Deb

Not knowing the couple, I'm short on ideas. I do have our invitation, decoupaged on wood and done by my mother. I haven't displayed it for years, but it's meaningful and I wouldn't get rid of it. I have my bouquet - dried not preserved so it doesn't look wonderful but I know what it is and that's what counts ;0) I can happily admit to having my brownie sash with all the badges too in a zippered little satin envelope in my lingerie chest. When I'm sorting, updating, I take it out and look at it, fold it carefully and put it back - with a pair of my childhood white Easter gloves that are about 2 1/2 inches long finger tip to wrist. I don't display a lot of personal things, it's not my decorating style but it doesn't mean they aren't important to me. Watchme, along with the brownie sash, there has been a cheaply made trophy here all our married lives, something presented to DH at a grade school hoop shoot tournament. And, all those years, I've heard from a friend of his that the trophy should have been his, of the two of them, he was the better player than DH. We're talking about maybe 4th grade, I barely remember 4th grade. When friend turned 50, I wrapped the trophy and gave it to him for his birthday present. He cried, and it's in their game room displayed now....these things matter to some ;0)