It has been a while since our last photography outing, so for this outing we headed over to the Captain Cook hotel downtown to check out their supposedly awesome gingerbread house village and multitude of Christmas trees. I planned ahead and brought my tripod and some new versions of my shaped booked cut-outs. No time like the present to try again!
I was a little skeptical since some things in Anchorage turn out to sound better than they are (ahem, tree lighting...), but the gingerbread village really was pretty impressive. Their head pastry chef has apparently been building a village for the last 36 years or so. I couldn't find the stats on this year, but last year was 850 pounds of frosting!
Breaking news! I found this years stats - 985 pounds of frosting and over 200 pounds of chocolate! I believe the amount of frosting, the whole thing looks like it is covered in thick (and delicious) snow.
Almost everything is edible - the only exceptions are the people and flowers (and I think some support structures in the mountains). It all looks like it was painstakingly put together and it is incredibly detailed. Plus the variety of colors and textures just make it fun to look at.
There are little signs on all of the houses and most of them are inspired by the chef's friends. This sign was one of my favorites - plus it was pink! Don't his snow covered rooftops look so thick & billowy?
My building! Jen's South Side sounds like a restaurant, right? Maybe that's because our diner we frequent is the South Side Grill. Either way, I like my house! :)
On to the trees! We were attempting a few different techniques since it was a club outing. The gingerbread village was mostly on focal point and depth of field. The trees were geared towards playing with the lights! The first effect was to work on getting a "twinkle" to the lights. I tried that the other day, but I saw some photos from one of my friends that made me want to try again - her twinkles looked way more obvious that what I had taken.
Unfortunately, the area with the trees was just too sunny. You wouldn't think that would be an issue in the middle of winter in Anchorage, but it just happened to be a gorgeously sunny day. I couldn't stop down the aperture and ISO enough to make the shutter speed long enough to get good twinkle. You can see tiny points of light starting to come off the light, but it's not very impressive. Oh well, but I'm still happy for the sun!
Instead of fighting the light, I decided to try my booked shapes again. I made a heart shaped one to play with too! Again, I was moderately successful. I think the people showing the awesome photos online must be cropping their photos quite a bit and therefore shooting much further away. This photo is somewhat cropped to get rid of the black around the edge, but you can still see it curving across the top.
Here's a standard shot with the sign in focus and the background enough out of focus that the lights start to blur. This one has nothing over the lens, so the lights are just round blurs.
Trying to match the same shot exactly, I couldn't get enough bokeh off the lights to see the stars, so I had to move around a bit and throw the sign somewhat out of focus to get the stars to pop. (And you can see a little black at the top again where I couldn't quite crop enough of the black out).
I think it might work better the further away from the light source you were, but I was working in tight quarters with several other people, so this was the best I could do. I'll have to try again at home. Maybe I can get Eliza to pose for me. There's not a chance the boys will sit still long enough for me to figure this out...!