We hosted a Thanksgiving feast for Gina’s parents, my Dad and my Grandma, the star of an earlier post. I used a brining recipe from Alton Brown of Good Eats fame and it turned out marvelous. It was the third or fourth time I’ve brined a turkey and it’s the only way to go. In my experience, roasted turkey is generally dry and unappealing. With the brining method the juices flow out of the bird like the Nile River when you hit it with the electric knife.
Using a technique I learned from the Strobist. I put my Vivitar 285HV on a light stand in one corner (behind the camera in this photo) and in the opposite corner nestled my SB 26 in a huge coffee mug sitting on a knick-knack shelf. Both flashes were set at 1/2 power and pointed at the ceiling. My D90 was set at 160th, f/9 and 400 ISO. The camera fired the Vivitar via poverty wizard and the SB 26 fired via optical slave. The intent was to get some nice even light from the flashes bounced off the ceiling. I got my initial exposure based on the ambient coming through a large window. That way when the window got into a frame it wouldn’t be a blown-out white square. And then I set the flash power by firing a few frames and chimping the LCD.
This setup worked pretty well, but the dining room is painted a kind of flourescent brown and the light bouncing around in there lent a brownish-red cast to everything. (Check out my face above.) I was able to correct some of that in Photoshop.
The food was excellent, thanks to Gina’s two days’ of hard work. The only blemish was my inability to find any Kraft garlic cheese to make my world-famous Uncle Slappy’s Shut Yo’ Mouth Cheese Grits. A Wal-Mart employee said they stopped carrying it last summer and a worker at Harp’s said Kraft quit making it. A little research revealed the bitter truth. And I’m not the only one upset about it. Though edible, the cheese grits disappointed.
Not much was left at the end of the day.
