Put on the kettle .....

Last week of March and woke up to an inch of snow on the front lawn. Hurried through my breakfast time chores to take my last photo of a "white snow scene" for this season.... & there it was----gone! So quickly a steady spring rain downpour had washed it all away. With plans askew, but not to be thwarted on this another day of Covid 19 virus lock-down, I began a prowl around the house to spot something--anything, to set my lens upon. With a morning cup of coffee on my mind, this photographer's eyes alighted on our stylish red kettle. While the water boiled, I looked at it from a variety of angles. On initial examination it appeared rather blah, unexciting, unappealing.  With a few sips of that hot, life sustaining liquid coursing through the old veins, ideas as to how I could tackle the project started to flood in. It quickly seemed apparent that this would have to be a macro photography project in order for me to move in close enough to capture small details of the kettle & to register them large on the sensor. My self set guideline is that the finished work would be abstract, such that I could ask you, the viewer, to identify the subject, and you would be unable to do so. Often the small details are much more enthralling than the full subject. But wait---before,  proceeding, experience has taught me that I should take a cloth with a small amount of detergent to give the outside of the kettle a real deep clean and polish--rubbing away microscopic particles and smears in corners that had been missed as part of our regular kitchen hygiene routine. Time spent in macro photography cleaning and preparing the subject in advance saves multiples of that (wasted) time in post processing making good a shoddy set-up.

In all, I took more than 60 images of the red kettle with my Nikon D610 fitted with a 35mm f2.0 prime plus a 12 mm expansion ring. My 'You Tube' teachers have impressed upon me the necessity to keep firing away in the search for an angle. Digital shots are free, so just click away to your heart's content. Often at the end of a photo session, I  have a sense that somehow I have failed to capture a 'keeper'. Only when I unload my work into Lightroom on the computer and have had time to thoughtfully review the shots, deleting and sorting possibles, do I realize that a few may have real potential. On this particular occasion 60 shots were reduced to fifteen, to six and finally to just four. As mentioned in earlier postings, I feel that as the owner of this creative output, that I have the right to take artistic licence to achieve end results that I find pleasing. I crop and sometimes reverse the image, I manipulate temperatures, contrast, levels and tints until I find the result that pleases my eye. This is all about technology and the human touch working in tandem.

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