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Excerpt from our new blog: No work, no kneading, what’s not to like?

David — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 16:00:52 +0000

My third attempt at "No Knead Bread" yielded this beautiful, rustic boule. | Canon 5D Mk. II and 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens | Exposed 1/100 sec. @ f/2.8, ISO 100 | 580EX II and 550EX Speedlites triggered with Canon ST-E2 Transmitter.

Our New Blog

Over the past couple of months, Elizabeth and I have been working on a project together: a combined cooking, gardening, and home improvement blog that we’ve named With One Cat in the Yard. Today I posted about making Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Bread (aka No-Work Bread), which was popularized in a Mark Bittman column in The New York Times in 2006, and I thought I would cross-post it formy readers here. Our new project is certainly not a photography blog–I’ve included the technical details for the photos in this post, but you won’t find them at With One Cat in the Yard–but I hope everyone will take a look. More to come!

Flour, salt, yeast, water, and time perseverance

I’m in my third week of attempting to make good bread. I’ve always enjoyed crusty bread, but I’ve never found the price of five dollars for a boule to be particularly attractive, so I rarely buy it.

Elizabeth suggested trying a recipe that inspired many food bloggers a few years ago: Jim Lahey’s “No Knead Bread” featured in Mark Bittman’s column in The New York Times. The recipe became so popular that publishers perceived a demand for a book, so Lahey wrote My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method to further explain his method and offer variations. Both Lahey and Bittman emphasize that the process is so simple that a child could make it happen, although I don’t think my mom ever would have trusted me to drop dough into a 450° F stock pot and put it back inside an oven. Sometimes I wonder why anyone would trust me to do that now.

The wet, sticky dough after its first rise (overnight). | Canon 5D Mk. II and 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens | Exposed 1/200 sec. @ f/11, ISO 100 | Canon 550EX Speedite triggered with 580EX II Speedlite on "Master."

My first effort was not completely successful, nor was my second, but the third was just right. I was skeptical that I could make a loaf of bread worthy of an artisan bakery, but lo and behold, it’s not only possible, but has quickly become one of my new favorite breads. Not only does it look amazing and have a satisfying, crackling crust, it’s also pretty tasty. Now, it’s not the best, most flavorful bread ever, but it does have a faint sourdough flavor of which I am quite fond (on account of the lengthy fermentation period) and it’s fantastic for dipping in soup, olive oil, or as sandwich bread.

The basic recipe is stunningly simple: three cups of bread flour, one and a half cuts of water, one and a quarter teaspoon of salt, and a quarter teaspoon of yeast are briskly mixed together in a bowl and then left alone overnight: at least 12 hours, but extra time does seem to yield better results. While the original recipe calls for 1 and 5/8 cups of water, the video on the Web site and also the recipes I found on several other blogs all called for one and a half cups, and indeed that seemed to work well. After the lengthy first rise, the dough is rolled into a ball, allowed to rise again, and then baked in a pot inside of a conventional oven at 450° F. This creates a “fake oven,” as Lahey refers to it in the aforementioned video, meaning that it simulates the steam-injected ovens found in professional bakeries. The moisture of the dough is trapped within the pot and circulates throughout, ensuring a crisp crust.

Note: the recipes I follow are at the end of the post!

No Knead Bread in a cast iron Dutch oven. | Canon 5D Mk. II and Zeiss 85mm f/1.4 ZE Planar T* lens | Exposed 1/40 sec. @ f/2, ISO 1600.

For my first few loaves I used Elizabeth’s hard-anodized, eight-quart stock pot. The current thinking is that anywhere from three to five quarts is just about “right” for No Knead Bread. (The original recipe called for a six to eight quart pot.) Combined with our concern that such high temperatures for an hour and fifteen minutes might deteriorate the non-stick coating, I purchased a Lodge five-quart cast iron Dutch oven on Amazon.

However, the sticking point to this bread–literally–is not the equipment needed, but the second rise of the dough. After a few attempts, I believe I’ve found an effective alternative to the original recipe. I offer you my experiences with this bread so that you can learn from my mistakes and quickly get to the point: great bread at a great price with relatively little effort.

Post continues at With One Cat in the Yard!

Content © 2011 David Kennedy | View Original Post | One comment | Filed under Announcements | Tags: 100mm f/2.8 Macro, Canon 550 EX, Canon 580 EX II, Canon ST-E2, EOS 5D Mark II, food, lighting, strobe, Strobist, studio, Zeiss 85mm f/1.4 ZE

Another “lunar surface” detail

David — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:15:37 +0000

Bottom crust of "No Knead Bread" | Canon 5D Mk. II and 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens | Exposed 1/160 sec. @ f/8, ISO 250 | Canon 550EX and Canon 580EX II flashes triggered via Canon ST-E2

Last week I hinted that I was beginning to explore baking my own bread. For the past couple of days I’ve been working with “No Knead Bread,” which became popular in 2006 with Mark Bittman’s article about baker Jim Lahey’s process that involves quickly mixing a rough dough and then letting it rise for at least 12 hours. I hope to perfect it soon, and with it, introduce everyone to a project we’ve been working on here in Durham for a few weeks now. More to come!

Craters on the surface

David — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 21:24:20 +0000

: Craters on the surface: light wheat bread recipe from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice featured on Smitten Kitchen | Canon 7D and 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens | Exposed 1/60 sec. @ f/8, ISO 200 | 580 EX II Speedlite fired in the DIY Beauty Dish on camera left.

Over the past month Elizabeth and I have been working on a new project I’ll be unveiling soon. Part of it is a new-found interest of mine: baking bread. I’ve never considered myself a good candidate for the Atkins diet because I simply cannot get enough bread in my life. Elizabeth has a bread machine that she purchased from a second hand store, and while neither one of us particularly likes the loaves it makes, I’ve found that it’s a fantastic dough-making machine–plus it takes care of the first rise. Pictured here is the top crust of a very basic, but very functional sandwich bread: Light Wheat Bread from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice and featured on the Smitten Kitchen.

Chocolate Coated Potato Chips with a side of Strobist

David — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:58:30 +0000

I really haven’t photographed food before–not in any serious fashion–so when I found myself confronted with a silver platter of chocolate-covered potato chips yesterday at the Candy Factory in Columbia, Mo., I was thrown for a loop.

There was no chance I would use existing light: it was a mix of daylight and tungsten, and exposing for the chips coated in which chocolate would have meant underexposing the others significantly. So I set up two lights bouncing into umbrellas at either end of the silver tray. It took me a while for all that I learned about photographing metal–and look how little of it wound up in the final frame!–and its family of angles to come back to me (about 50 chimped frames) but once the reflections were under control, it just became a matter of the ratio between the key and the fill lights.

Ultimately, the SB-80-DX, on camera left, was fired at a third stop under 1/2 power, and the 550EX on camera right was fired at 1/16 power. Could I have balanced those a bit? Probably. The shadows cast by the milk chocolate potato chips bother me a bit. I’ll file that in the “next time” category.

Canon 5D II and 70-200mm f/4 L IS lens @100mm with 25mm extension tube; exposed 1/160 sec. @ f/11, ISO 200.

Ghosts on a Bridge – Painting with Light

David — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 06:26:38 +0000

Romantic ghosts of prom past on the MKT Trail, Columbia, Mo.

For a group project for Advanced Techniques, Vivian Esparza, Charles Ludeke, Lesley Freeman, and I met up at the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial along the MKT Trail in Columbia, Mo. to make a long time exposure with added light–also called “painting with light” for its surreal effect.

Charles friend, Michelle, agreed to be a model for us on the bridge. After thinking on it for a bit, we decided that we should include a male figure in the photo, and Charles volunteered that he had a yellow tux (rental) in his car from a social gathering a on Friday night.

The background trees were lit with a Nikon SB-900 gelled green. I fired it off at 1/4 power for the nearer trees, and worked my way up to 1:1 for the background trees (knowing that they would be far too dark otherwise). Vivian did a great job of painting the bridge blue (an SB-900 with a blue gel), and Lesley walked along the bridge once with a flashlight aimed downward (on the ground, along the railing). Lesley then used a different flashlight, gelled red, to paint the post and upper railing of the bridge.

Finally, Charles and Michelle would pose on the bridge, and I used my Canon 550EX with the Panera straw-grid, dialed at 1/2 power, to “freeze” our ghosts in the frame.

All told, the exposure came to 5.7 minutes @ f/8, ISO 200 using a Canon 5D Mark II and 70-200mm f/4 IS lens @ 81mm…and a couple hours of experimentation. It was a great collaboration….and I think we might go back in a week to do something a little bit different ( but not in time for class).

An evening spent painting with light

David — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 06:11:15 +0000

Just an outtake from a class experiment with light painting at Rock Bridge State Park in Columbia, Mo. This was likely the most successful image of the evening. There’s also an assignment to pursue this line of work in smaller groups, so look for something different in the coming days.

Canon 5D Mk II, 93 seconds @ f/7.1, ISO 800. White balance and curves adjusted in Lightroom.

Flash for Balancing and Fill

David — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 06:46:59 +0000

Ryan McCullen of Hubert Builders boards up the window frames of 22 9th Street in Columbia, Mo. The space, which was previously the headquarters of the local Obama for America campaign, is now being renovated for a planned women's boutique.

“Fill flash.” It’s a term familiar to pretty much everyone. The only thing that makes it more interesting is when you decide to take the flash off of the camera and place it on a stand. This frees up the photographer to place the light where it should be, not where the camera is positioned. For wildlife photographed with a 500mm lens, placing the flash on axis makes a lot of sense–on a cloudy day just dial down the flash to -2 or -3 EV (via ETTL), put a Better Beamer on there, and call it a day.

For this assignment I was working with less space than I would have liked, and what began as a completely open storefront was actually being boarded up by the construction worker, Ryan McCullen. I really wanted a second light: one inside (behind him) to work in tandem with the flash that I had with me. Of course, before he boarded up the windows, I had two lights (the sun, hopefully operating at full power…).

I triggered the flash on the light stand with some “Poverty Wizards”–the cheap radio remotes from Hong Kong that are all over eBay. I do own a Canon remote trigger, but it is based on infrared line-of-sight, and in bright sun it simply doesn’t work. If I could afford Pocket Wizards…some day. Until then, the cheap eBay remotes seem to be working!

With a little help from the fill light slider in Lightroom, the image opens up pretty nicely, and the juxtaposition between McCullen working away and the motley crew of people hanging out on the street–”We’re All Vampires” does amuse me.

More after the jump…

Here’s a basic breakdown of my lighting setup, as well as the original (untoned) image:

Blending new techniques with old passions

David — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 07:59:48 +0000

Nikon D300 w/ 24-70 f/2.8 and SB-900 triggered by CLS. Exposed 1/250 sec. @ f/14, ISO 250

For the past few days I’ve been peering over at the other side of the fence to see what Nikon has to offer with regard to off-camera lighting. I had heard about CLS–the Creative Lighting System–for some time, but few here at Mizzou seem to be using it. Finally, I just decided to check it out for myself, so I borrowed a D300 and an SB900 Speedlight and discovered how ridiculously easy it is to control the flash unit from the camera in either fully-manual or ETTL modes. From the perspective of a Canon user, it’s just sick.

More after the jump…

All it takes to make a camera like the D300 (or the D70, D80, D200, D700, or some others, too) control a flash like the SB-900 wirelessly is to go into custom functions and make the pop-up flash a “Commander.” Scott Kelby put together a very simple-to-follow video on how CLS works on his “DTown” Web site. It’s a little too much of a Nikon-fanboy-ish Web site for my own taste, but the information is great.

Essentially, the pop-up flash emits a coded light “pulse” that tells the flash how to behave. For instance, you can tell it to fire at 1:128 power on one frame, and then adjust it back up to 1:1 for the next shot, all from the back of the camera. That the TTL functions (positive and negative flash-exposure-compensation) also works this way is less surprising. Even Canon cameras and flashes can do this with the ST-E2 transmitter. But the ST-E2 cannot control Canon speedlites in manual mode, making this eye-opening for me.

So, in my first days of experimenting with this new functionality, I found that some of my best images came from a blending of my interest in architecture with my new zeal for off-camera flash (for which I blame Strobist and my MU Advanced Techniques course).

The results were the image above, purposefully exposed to make the unlit portions of the scene very dark, as well as the image below, exposed to allow more of the lower level show up. Note that both exposures were made to overpower the existing light (at the D300′s max sync speed of 1/250 sec.) because I wanted to control how the light played out in the stairwell of the Reynolds Journalism Institute on the MU campus. If I had exposed this normally, it would simply have been an evenly-lit, boring photograph. I could still have added some interest with the flash, but not nearly as much as I did by making the flash the only light.

I’m looking forward to playing with the Nikon system some more–next time I’m checking out two SB-900′s. Watch out, world.

Nikon D300 w/ 24-70 f/2.8 and SB-900 triggered by CLS. Exposed 1/250 sec. @ f/8, ISO 250