Cookies. Damnit. (now with actual content!)

Well damn. I had a nice long post that was informative and all, but I lost it because it took so damn long to type. I'll recall the info and post it later tonight. For now, have some cookies.

updated!
d (^.^) b <--little face with thumbsup There's just something about the sight and smell of a homemade chocolate chip cookies that both warms you up and starts up your appetite. Makes you wish for a glass of milk eh? I took the above picture using the same portrait setup as the wedding shots posted a month ago( Canon 20d, 24-70mm f2.8 L lens, 420EX flash bounced off a Demb Big FlipIt! ). These cookies were a donation to a bakesale that I helped organize as part of a peer staff council at work. We were pretty successful in our initial endevour, as we raised about $450 for 2 cyclists that were participating in an AIDS benefit race. We had lots of donations, everything from poundcake, carrotcake, chess-pie (?), chocolate dipped pretzels, and of course chocolate chip cookies. We sweetened the pie (so to speak) by actually making it a sort of contest, Iron Baking as it were. For the curious: The photo was shot in horrendously unfriendly flourescent light, filled by my bounced flash (diffused fill, bounce off the ceiling). This results in a fairly "cold" picture, but the light's more uniform, while highlighting the details in the sugar. A bit of adjustment on the color (warmth!) and saturation and some sharpening and voila' food for the eyes. For my friends who are trying to take their photography more seriously (the rest of you can stop reading now, cuz this is pure camera junkie crap): Get an external flash. Even if you don't think you need the flash, you can't go wrong by having it attached and ready. Think about it, all the major components of a camera are meant to either record, focus, or record light. Without enough light in the entire picture you end up with a murky darkness. You'll never hear "there's too much light in here!" from most photographers. Unless you're carrying a tripod and do available light shots, a flash is a must have for on the go photogs. Don't even think you can get by with the flash that's built in on most modern SLRs and consumer D-SLRs. The standard model flashes used by both canon and nikon (the 430ex and SB-600 respectively) have a flash power rating, called the Guide number that's 10 times more powerful than the pea-shooter built in to their any of their SLRs and D-SLRs. What's this allow? Well say you want to compete with the brightest source of light we can think of, the Sun. You've got your subject a good distance in front of you, but behind them is the sun. Since they're backlit, if you had no fill flash, you'd just see an artsy silhouette of them. With your built in flash you'd get a few details like possibly a nose or the hair. Since they're not right up in front of you, the light from your flash has to travel further, losing potency at an increasing rate over distance. So a flash that's 10x more powerful is a necessity in a brightly lit scene! Now, the oppossite, a dimly lit bar, a few friends across the way. No flash, and you have a blurry mess. With the built in flash, you'll get your friends faces, but since you only have a single directional light source, you'll get a very dark background. If you're all in a drunken stupor how are any of you going to remember where you were? ;-) Here an external bounced flash does wonders. You not only see your friends, but you see what's around and behind them. For those of you that like taking photos of people, there are two added benefits to an external flash. The first being a pretty "catchlight" in your subjects eyes, and a huge reduction in "red-eye". Red pupils are a reflection of light off of the blood vessels and retina. Seeing the demon-eye is a function of how close the flash is to the horizontal axis of the lens on your camera. Don't believe in red-eye reduction pre-flashes, not only does it reduce your battery time immensley, but it is more likely to cause a bad photo as your subjects are blinking like crazy. What's that you say? It's expensive? Yeah, but it's WORTH IT. Don't even think of going with a cheap 3rd party flash. These guys have to try to reverse engineer the communications between a camera and the 1st party made flashes. Stick with the manufacturer of your camera, and you'll never go wrong. Canon users this means the 430ex at $230 or so, and Nikon-ers it's the SB-600 at $190-200. (okay I'll bite, the canon is more expensive because it's newer and is optimized for use with the smaller sensors on most consumer digitals, while still performing as before on full frame film and digitals).

For my friends with other digital cameras or smaller point and shoots, you could benefit from an additional flash too! Some of the bigger point and shoot (film and digi) have 1st party flash shoes just like their SLR and DSLR big brothers. Canon cats, you can probably get by with a 220ex. I don't know what the Nikon equivalent is. For those of you who only have the little onboard red-eye enhancer flash on your cameras, you can use something like this little honey from Metz.

Yeah, food bloggers, this applies to you too. You'd LOVE it.

-k