Look out, Anne Geddes, I am now a photographer . . . of boiled tube meat. Yes, I know, you thought I was a writer. And I am. But my second novel BIG MOUTH is about competitive hot dog eating, and I’m creating a website about it that will go live in a few days, and I needed an image of a hot dog that did not exist. What to do about that? Why, do my own hot dog photo shoot, of course!
First, I gathered the supplies and cooked up a pot of Ballpark Franks. Grandma was watching the boys and I had half an hour before I needed to leave to meet some author friends for lunch. I’d see what I could accomplish in thirty minutes, and let me tell you, it really was a question, considering I had no idea what I was doing.
Never one to let cluelessness stop me, I tried many different scenarios, with different backgrounds and various light sources. Like I said, I had NO idea what I was doing, and I was using a regular old digital camera and natural light from the front windows and the back sliding door, so this whole experiment was comparable to me sticking my hand in a dark, muddy hole to see what I’d pull out. Here are some samples that aren’t too embarrassing.
Luckily, my photographer friend Theresa knows how to juice up a photo’s contrast in PhotoShop and trim around the edges. Voila! A Big Mouth Hot Dog, hold the relish. (See first picture above. Not too awful, huh?) When I brought my camera to the author lunch (for which I was thirty minutes late . . . big surprise), Helen Foster James and Jean Ferris thought the photos were professional. Granted, I showed them the thumbnail-sized versions on my camera’s tiny little screen . . . in subdued Cheesecake Factory lighting, no less. But I was happy for the compliments anyway.
All in all, I like the way the final Big Mouth Hot Dog photo turned out and am hatching plans for yet another hot dog photo shoot. And why not? Photographing hot dogs is a lot easier than photographing toddler triplets . . . hot dogs don’t run at Mach 10 in three different directions.
marianne says
The “dogs” look good from here in Crotia. Sorry we are going to miss the radio show. We know it will be GREAT.Mom and Dad