Toaster

Jerry Yarnetsky

=The Toaster=

Having been a journalist in my prior life, I have some basic photography experience. Thus I wanted to play with manual settings and bizarre angles in this part of the assignment.

For the assignment I borrowed the camera I bought my wife's for her 40th birthday (yes, the camera is black). The Panasonic FZ-7 has a very strong flash, image stabilization and full manual control. It's wonderful to work with and operates very fast.

I took my photos of our kitchen toaster.



Understand that we are slowly working on renovating an 1840s commercial building and our kitchen is extremely unfinished. The room has poor lighting and has no cabinets or counters to speak of. Our sole counter is left over from a restaurant that was here maybe 20 years ago. It's the ugliest pink on earth, but it will work until we get our kitchen installed.



The first thing I wanted to show is how long it's been since I've remembered to clean out the toaster. The innards of the toaster was dark and being in a dim room I knew I needed to use the flash. Because I held the camera so close to the toaster, the flash blasted the metal and overexposed the image. I played with the settings and found that I could dial down the flash and was able to light the innards of the toaster just right. The photo was slightly under exposed, but you could actually see the metal details. In Photoshop I lightened the photo a bit more and sharpened the image using unsharp mask.



I really liked the filiments aglow here. This was a longer exposure (1/4 second). The image is shaky because I did not have a tripod for the camera. I braced the camera against our standup oven, but it wasn't enough to make the image sharp. Later I figured out how to adjust the ISO and I could have gained a bit of shutter speed, but I still like how this turned out.



Finally, I love the lights on our toaster. These were taken with the camera sitting on the counter so I could take a long exposure (1/5 sec) yet have a reasonably sharp photo. The camera was too close to use the flash. When I tried it a couple times, but the camera lens threw a huge shadow on the toaster.

With the lights on I had to try about 15 shutter speeds until I got it right (again 1/5 second). To reduce the halo effect in the lens I went to an angled shot. Again I wish I had a tripod so the image would have been sharper.

Finally all the shooting made me hungry so I did up a bagel...