Blanca, So funny that you mention "happy" music for your plants. When I was in high school I did a comparison between plants grown from seeds under identical conditions; the only exception was that one group had Disney music played (it was an LP that played over and over automatically if that hints at the years). When I told the Disney company of my findings (don't know why I did, but guess I thought they should know that their music was involved in this positive study) they sent me a new LP!! Whoo hoo...I think I must have been 15. That was the same year that my biology teacher spent extra time before/after school and taught me meristem culture of orchids (I think that's what it was called). It involved taking pieces of an orchid, cutting it and plating it out on agar in flasks, and it grew into clumps of cells that would be transferred again and that made new baby epidendrum orchids. When I was in Costa Rica and saw fields of these red/orange orchids growing wild, I thought of Mr. Havickhorst. He was like a surrogate father to me (my own dad and I butted heads) and we still keep in touch!! OK...so that's way more than you wanted to know about me! Kristi

Thanks autumngal. :) You convinced me to FINALLY find my old Flickr acct. and post some pics of the house. A lot of the pics were taken for other reasons but I had them on file so that made it easy. The link's at the bottom of this post. I've been looking at your Flickr acct. again and I'm starting to think I HAVE seen your pics before. I remember the tin ceiling making quite an impression! In fact I often think of your kitchen when I visualize how my mudroom might look like when the wall comes down and it gets turned into more of an eating space attached to the kitchen. It has lower ceilings than the kitchen. I just love all the little details in your kitchen. Love those open shelves and the homemade jars at the very top! Nice countertop too. I almost did wood but chickened out in the end (hopefully I won't regret doing stainless). columbusguy1 - same thing - sort of - happened to me a couple of days ago. My contractor removed the last of the lower cabinets and when he did, the one on the right (seen in pics attached below on Flickr) showed that the wood trim to the right of the kitchen-to-dining room door had never been painted! I can't make sense of it. I guess the two most likely scenarios are that the kitchen was once unpainted but with a finish over the wood - but the finish (or whatever you call it) wasn't applied until after the lower cabinets were put in, which is a little odd. Or, it wasn't ever finished wood and was part of that whole "sterile" movement back about a hundred years ago and was always painted a lighter color perhaps. Although I couldn't find white paint on the walls. The oldest color seems to be a light sage-avocado kind of color (not unlike the color mine is now actually - though maybe lighter and maybe with a hair bit more gold in it?) and then the color over that is a sort of cherry pink!! Perhaps way back then the cupboards were painted white re. the sterile phase. Maybe someday I'll find out if we remove layers of paint on them. At any rate it's particularly odd because whichever way the woodwork was, the door trim - like I was saying - is unfinished wood below countertop height. So whatever used to be there, originally went all the way to the end of the door trim (about 21 or 22"). But I always assumed the crappy, unoriginal lower cabinets' presence meant there originally was nothing below except like a wall-mounted old sink and maybe the kind of wooden countertop that rests on wall brackets and has a lip sitting on top of the sink's mouth on either side. This lack of paint or finish on the door trim indicates there WERE built-ins below. So WHY OH WHY are they missing now? Almost the whole house is original and in good-enough shape that I can't understand why those cabs are missing. Am I missing something re. that unpainted door frame/trim? So odd... Lastly I just wanted to say that one of my upper cabinets also has a hole for letting some air in. My grandmother's house used to have one too and she called it a "cooler." I agree it was probably acting as a pie safe of sorts or else even helped chill extra food in the winter (?). Mine doesn't have a door on the outside of the house though - although there's siding there so who knows what's under there! I would love to see a pic of that pastry-storing cabinet of yours!! And the rest, so get on it please! ;) Here are more pics of my house: Here is a link that might be useful: Photos of house, living room, dining room, nook, kitchen

Judy does what I've always done when seeing your creations Flamey. I have to come back or look them over time and again to see all of the tiniest of details you add. I remember dissecting Nectarine and her paraphernalia when I had her just to see the terrific handy work and how your talented and creative mind works. :)

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!