Don’t Forget the Highlights!

As a source of neutral midtones to set color balance from, I mean.

Black leather jackets. Asphalt pavement. Black t-shirts. All of these, if they have highlights going on, can easily get tones up into the midrange (which I think of as 90-180, roughly) suitable for use with the gray eyedropper for setting color balance.

If it’s dark mixed with specular highlights, though, it’s usually not useful; specular highlights are by definition not a useful source of color balance, since the ability of the sensor to capture the light falling on it has been exceeded. The ratio of colors in a specular highlight pixel doesn’t tell you anything about the actual color of the light falling on it there.

Dyer-Bennet’s Fourth Law

“Don’t waste your time arguing about allocating blame.  There’ll be enough to go around.”

I believe there never was a third law.  The first and second seem to be lost (I vaguely remember that at least one of them was a simple theft of one of the classics).  If anybody remembers, or especially has or can find archived posts where I cite the earlier laws, I’d be fascinated to hear.

Dyer-Bennet’s Dictum

“All photos are best taken from a camera position that hurts your knees.”

I’ve just been reviewing (and responding to comments on) an LJ post where I brought this up, and I found myself thinking this several times last night while photographing at a party, and it occurred to me that I might as well get it down solidly on my record.

It’s amazing how often my best shot seems to be just a foot below eye-level.  Or else just about 3 feet off the floor.

450° Oven

Tonight I tried a technique that I got from Lynn on The Splendid Table last weekend (while I was driving around town alone; that’s when the radio is on). She gave it in response to a college student who liked to cook and wanted a new technique (he started with stir fry, as did I).

Worked great.

It’s one of those general ideas that can be applied millions of ways.  If I understood right, the name comes from the fact that the oven temperature is really the only thing that holds true across the whole range of things you can do with it.

Here’s what I did:

Slice about 3/4lb of pork and marinate in lemon juice, olive oil, red wine, a couple of cloves of garlic, and rosemary.  Oh, and a good squirt of oriental pepper sauce.

Preheat oven to 450°.

Peel and slice one sweet potato pretty thin (3/16 kinda).

Cut one red and one green peppers into strips.

Cut two onions so they fall apart into strips.

Cut one yellow zucchini into 1/4inch-plus slices.

Dump the veggies into a pan as big as will fit (in area; doesn’t need to be deep).  Or two.  Pour on some olive oil, quite a lot of oregano, some basil, salt, and pepper.  Mix a bit.  Dump the meat and marinade over it, and get the meat spread out.

Put in oven until done.  Was about 50 minutes this time.

We ate it wrapped in burrito-scale tortillas; sort of Italian burritos.

Lydy and I voted it a success, but there were some leftovers anyway.