kitchen sink # 30 ~ a return to the scene of the crime

left over pasta with coffee grounds ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen

While most of my kitchen sink pictures are found arrangements - I walk up to the sink and there it is - this one is a bit of a hybrid inasmuch as it was recreation of a found arrangemt.

Serval days ago, I walked up to the sink and there in front of me was the strainer with pasta and coffee grounds just poised to be tossed in the garbage by the wife. There was no time to make a picture so I "rescued", accompanied by a few moans and groans from the wife, the strainer and contents and set it aside for next day picturing.

Next morning there was a dirty sauté pan in the sink along with a few cooking utensils. I set the strainer in the sauté pan and waited for the light to be "nice". Late morning I got the shot.

After processing the picture, I wasn't quite happy with it. There was small area on the front rim of the strainer which was struck by direct sunlight which caused the pasta in the that area to be burned out and no amount of finagling could bring it back. I came to this conclusion too late in the day, light wise, to reshoot.

So, I once again set the strainer aside, cleaned all the dirty stuff in the sink - the sauté pan was needed for prepping dinner - and planned to reshoot in the next AM. Which is exactly what I did. However ....

... the previous day's arrangement was long gone. The only thing to do was to rebuild the arrangement using the previous day's picture. I gathered and arranged all the elements, waited for the same light and made the picture, creating 3 bracketed exposures.

Those brackets allowed me to get the highlight detail I was looking for by blending the highlight area from the darker bracket into my correctly exposed frame. A bit of local contrast adjustments later and, voilà, all was right with the picture making world.