Alternate post title: “Why I couldn’t finish my salad this evening”
I’m home alone tonight because first, someone had the audacity to high-tail it to a Caribbean island and bask in the tropical sun without me. Second, the ensemble that our son is a part of is performing tonight with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. Everyone’s got big and important things to do. Including me. This afternoon, I had the equally-notable privilege of making sure the family car was properly inspected at the absolute last day possible without the risk of a ticket. That, and I had to buy cucumbers.
Muy importante. That’s my role around here.
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Meet Simon. Simon is the father-in-law of Tom’s friend. He grows fields of sweet potatoes, and is also a dear, sweet man. So I guess that makes “Simon, The Sweet Potato Farmer” a title that can be interpreted two ways. Once again, here’s Tom.
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Just wanted to give you an idea of what’s coming next.
First, we have another travel post from my dear husband Tom. In case you missed it, he’s reporting to us from the Caribbean. He’s also taken to signing his emails with “Writing under the sun,” which just makes me want to cry and hide inside the oven.
And so, to console myself, I baked these.
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As I continue my seemingly-forever fight with this upper respiratory bug, my husband Tom is in the warm Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago. He escorted his elderly mother there so she can escape the cold northeast winter for a few weeks, but not before I extracted a promise from him to fully document his trip. Armed with my Canon S5 and a Magic Jack (let’s see how that works out—so far, it’s been troublesome), he vowed to be this blog’s first ever “foreign correspondent.”
After some internet difficulties down there, I finally began to receive his first missives and photos. And so I’d like to introduce you to my husband Tom, intrepid travel reporter, currently working on assignment (ha! I get to pretend he works for me!) in his home country of Trinidad and Tobago. I love how he simply refers to it as “the island.” (I, on the other hand, come from a country with over 7,000 islands, so I’m going to start referring to my home country as “the islands.” Just to remind him who’s got more.)
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One of more controversial debates going on right now in the world of photography is HDR photography, short for High Dynamic Range photography. Please don’t ask me for an accurate explanation of the terms or even how it works. The first time I even heard of the term was during the MPIX New York photo tour last year. During the opening question-and-answer session, Rick Sammon explained that while the human eye sees about an 11-f-stop range, a single photo can only capture maybe 4 f-stops. Combining multiple exposures of the same photo can hopefully replicate the same amount of detail that ours eyes can see, from the details that are hiding in the shadows to what appears blown out in the highlights. You therefore expand the range visible in a photo, hence the HDR acronym.
I happen to like HDR, but I prefer it applied with a light touch—enough to remain realistic without going overboard and looking almost cartoon-like. (Although there are definitely artistic applications for that, too.) For example, I’ve always loved the photography of Ansel Adams, and found it interesting that he is often referred to as the first HDR photographer. It makes sense, because when you examine his photographs closely, you can see how much detail there is in the deep shadows and in the bright skies and reflections. His darkroom technique involved meticulously manipulating the contrast in the negative in order to display a wider range of visual information. In other words, HDR.
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