Since April is over, I am not going to post every day – it was a great challenge for me though. But I felt that I had to write this post soon after my yesterday’s one to show how I am using the vegetables I mentioned in the Lensbaby Blog Circle post.

While visiting grandparents in Colorado a month ago, my father-in-law introduced us to a great salad mix he constantly makes. We learned the recipe, and have been creating this salad base since then. I call it a salad base, because we love adding additional items to it after it’s plated. But the base itself only contains vegetables that are “dry”, therefore the mix keeps for days in the fridge in a Ziploc bag.

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A few days ago I hinted that I was going to bring up a topic and a related project I started working on. The topic is a life style change my husband and I decided on at the end of January, and it involves a diet change. We have been eating a lot less carbohydrates and minimized the sugar intake as well. We are not following a “brand name” diet, we have been just making more educated choices when it comes to our food. I don’t want this post to be just about the diet, but I do want to say that in addition to losing a lot of weight we are also feeling full of energy.

Eating a low-carb diet means that our vegetable intake has increased, and our fruit choices have changed as well. A few weeks ago I thought of a photographic project I could start that involves our new lifestyle. I want to photograph the food items that we are encouraged to eat, and therefore we have them at home almost all the time. In order to make these images a bit more interesting, I also started learning about food photography just recently. Hopefully, you’ll see an improvement in my food photos throughout this project.

A few days ago I posted some strawberry images. Strawberries are one of the recommended low-carb fruit, and I’ll repost two of my favorite images from the set:

Lensbaby Single Glass at F5.6

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After completing my long theater photography project today, I needed a bit of air. I set outside in the backyard, and I noticed that my cucumber plants started developing baby cucumbers! I grabbed my camera with the Lensbaby Velvet 56 and the +10 macro filter, and took these few images to share you with.

And I found a tiny garden helper on the dill as well:

I was supposed to post this yesterday (to keep up with my daily posts), but it was a very busy day for me. I’ll tell you about that in a different post later.

I chose this project for three different reasons. One is that I have been learning a tiny bit about food photography, and I wanted to try out some of what I had learned. Secondly, I haven’t done a comparison between lenses experiment for a while, and I want to find the best lens(es) for what I want to start now – which would be the third reason for the project. But I’d like to share that with you at another time.

This is what I tried yesterday:

I set up a plate of yummy strawberries on my dining room table, since I get the most natural light there. I used two white reflectors to bounce some of the light back on the fruit. I then used the following lenses with or without macro attachments and at various apertures: Nikon 50mm, Lensbaby Velvet 56, Single Glass, Double Glass, Twist 60 and Sol 45. I am going to show you the images that I liked the most – for different reasons. Some, because they somewhat resembled an image I would see in a magazine (with more props or better composition perhaps), others because of their very unusual looks and feelings. I’d be happy to know which images you appreciate the most.

  1. Nikon 50mm with 12mm macro extension tube

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