Tuesday, December 7, 2010

A Thanksgiving Blackout (plus other stories)

So here we were hosting a traditional Thanksgiving Day feast.  Just our luck we had a power outage that day, starting about noon and lasting until 10:00 PM, just about the time people were leaving.
A brief panic ensued; after which time Plan B was amassed: Our kids live about two miles away, and they still had power.  We moved the entire feast over to their ovens, and started getting out the candles and camping lantern.  Baked desserts were completed on the BBQ.  Whipped cream was whipped via a battery-powered drill retrofitted with a beater.  And Thanksgiving was held, successfully, by candlelight.

Being the family photographer, it’s my job to document everything, and the worst thing I could have done on this night is to use a flash to take pictures.  When you’re dining by candlelight, you want to be able to capture the emotional warmth that the candles can provide.  So I set my A55 to 12,800 (it’s second-highest ISO) and shot in RAW, knowing that my new copy of Lightroom 3 would be able to quash the noise better than any software I've owned previously.  (Click on any image to make it larger.)