Jelly shots for the New Year

WHAT

A shot of the inside of my fridge which, at the moment, is home to dozens of vodka jelly shots in preparation for my New Year's Eve party.

The green ones are lime, the blue are 'berry blue' flavour (they taste a bit like 'Demazin' cold medicine) and the red ones are raspberry flavour. I also have another tray of 'creaming soda' flavoured shots on another shelf.

The recipe for making these shots is at the bottom of this post

WHY

I took this photo mainly to document the jelly shots as part of my NYE party. I've never made jelly shots before and was quite pleased with the results - let's hope the party guests like them too!

I also liked how the light from inside the fridge lit the shots and made some of them appear to glow. Plus, it's not everyday that the inside of the fridge becomes a worthy photographic subject :)

HOW

I hand-held my camera as close to the tray of jelly shots as I could (but still allowing proper focus to be made) so as to avoid other fridge items creeping into the scene as much as possible.

Because it was relatively dark in the fridge and I wanted a fairly shallow depth of field, I opened up the aperture to f/4. This wider aperture allowed more light in to the camera's sensor which meant I could increase the shutter speed (1/13s) to get the hand-held shot without the need for a tripod.

I focused on the centre row of jelly shots (third row from the front).

POST-PRODUCTION

In photoshop, I increased the clarity, black point and vibrance to really make the jelly colours stand out. These alterations also made the rim of the plastic shot glasses brighter and highlighted the white 'reflection' on the tops of the four blue shots at the front.

I also cropped the shot to remove the milk bottle and other assorted fridge items that had snuck in at the sides.

Recipe:

I used 'Aeoroplane' jelly crystals

Place jelly crystals in a bowl.

Pour 1 cup of boiling water over crystals and stir very well to dissolve.

Add 150ml vodka

Add 50ml cold water

Stir again

Pour mixture into shot glasses

Refrigerate for approximately 4 hours.

NB. If you add too much vodka, the shots will not set properly. Also, to remove the shot from the glass, you may need to run a cake tester or teaspoon around the sides of the glass. Alternatively, you can place a small amount of oil inside the shot glass before making the jelly - I haven't tried this but I've read about other people who did this. I didn't know if the oil would affect the taste or not.

Sunrise at the beach

WHAT

Sunrise at the public swimming pool at King's Beach, Caloundra. Caloundra is a beautiful sea-side town situated on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland and is about 1 hour north of Brisbane.

WHY

King's Beach has been a favourite holiday destination of my family's for over 20 years. I love going up there at this time of the year (or any time of year for that matter) and was on a recent 'weekend getaway' with my husband. I realised that in all my trips to this beautiful location, I'd never once seen the sun rise there. Of course, I had to make ammends by capturing it with my camera!

Prior to the sun rising on this day, I'd been at the other end of King's Beach attempting to get a nice sea-scape shot of the water flowing over the rocks at low-tide. This proved fairly unsuccessful due to the large amount of cloud around at the time.

After the sun had risen, I wandered up the beach to the location seen in the image above and loved the way the umbrellas were silhouetted in the sunlight. I then spotted the boat on the horizon.

HOW

I positioned myself so that the shade structure on the left would block out the intense, glaring white ball that was the sun and then waited for the boat to sail along until it was between 2 of the umbrellas.

I think I used a tripod for this one as I had intended to make an HDR image using 3 different exposure values and therefore needed the 3 shots to be identical. However, I decided that the HDR version of this shot didn't look very good so I opted for this exposure (the '0' EV) instead.

I used the aperture priority setting, set to f/16 with a shutter speed of 1/160s.

POST PRODUCTION

I used photoshop to shift the tint of this shot slightly towards the purple end of the spectrum to give the sky a nice colour.

Colourful City Abstract

WHAT

This is a detailed look at the side of the colourful 'Santos' building on Tank Street, Brisbane City. The grey/blue squares are the windows and the pink/red/orange colours mark each floor of the building.

WHY

On this particular day, I'd been searching for some 'abstract' style shots around Brisbane City. This building caught my eye because of the contrasting bright colours. I thought it was a perfect candidate image to add to one of the groups of which I'm a member on 'Redbubble' called "Abstract Lines".

It wasn't until I took at look at this shot on my computer that I realised I'd managed to capture 2 office ceiling lights on the right hand side of my image, which I quite liked.

HOW

For this shot, I was standing on the footpath a block over from the Santos building and at about a 45 degree angle to the side of the Santos building. I used a tripod and attached my 70-300m lens so I could sufficiently zoom in to the colourful features of the building and exclude the sky or any other nearby structures. I set the camera to manual mode and zoomed to 180mm.

Taken at aperture f/10 and 1/200s shutter speed

POST PRODUCTION

I used photoshop to slightly increase the vibrance of the building's colours