chicken salad

Chicken salad made with the chicken bits roasted previously. I am now down to the last of the chicken bits. Mayonnaise whipped with an immersion blender, one egg, olive oil, rice vinegar, dijon, fresh ginger and garlic, Himalayan salt and fresh ground pepper. I forgot to add sugar, which didn't matter for this because the pickle relish is sweet.


‹photography pedantry›

Do you like my picture? I tried a new thing. They say, they being professional photographers, and say meaning they wrote it, that fluorescent lighting is the big suck. But not all fluorescent lights are created equally. And the world of fluorescents has come a long way. Now fluorescents are manufactured to imitate daylight. For example, this well-respected table top daylight-imitating fluorescent lamp uses two 27 W bulbs. That got me thinking, "Hey! I have six of those bulbs." I used them to grow tomatoes, and mine are 30W. Plus, I have directional lamp fixtures, and that set up there is more for creating ambient glow. I prefer sharper directional light that creates highlights and sharper contrasty shadowing. Maybe I can coax my fluorescent to be directional by using different fixtures. So that's what I did. This was taken at night with one 30 W fluorescent aimed directly at the side from about two feet away.

The camera's white balance (WB) was set to fluorescent, WB icon looks like a horizontal bar with emanating rays. ISO, International Standard Organization, don't ask, it's foreign, they switch things around. Words are so switched, they can't even get their acronyms straight by the time it filters over to us in English, originally, Organisation internationale de normalisation. Get this: using the International Phonetic Alphabet, ISO is pronounced ˈɑɪsəʊ/, which translates in English to sounding like "eye sew." Ha ha ha. Anyway, in digital photography, ISO is the measure of sensor sensitivity to light that equates to film speed ASA. Film with lower sensitivity requires longer exposure to light, digital sensors imitate that. Usually digital camera sensors become noticeably more grainy as ISO increases. The Kodak DX 7630, for example, becomes quite grainy at ISO 400. Here, I took a brief series of photos, they all looked acceptable in the live view replay, but I started out arbitrarily at ISO 500, then ISO 650, then ISO 800, then ISO 1,000. The images seemed to get faintly brighter with each incremental increase, but I could tell no difference in overall quality. ISO was the only adjustment I made, the camera adjusted aperture opening (f-stop) and shutter speed automatically. That's why the pictures all looked the same, the camera compensated using its other two adjustments available. If I wanted a brighter or darker picture, I'd have to switch to manual and control those adjustments myself. This information is provided for your digital photographing enjoyment and success. White balance is the most commonly overlooked aspect of digital photography among amateur photographers, the most neglected feature on digital cameras, and ISO sensor sensitivity setting is the least understood. Regarding the camera, it's good to know what those buttons do.

‹/photography pedantry›