A Hostess (with the mostess?)

My Birthday weekend was epic! Let me tell you why:

1. First, there were not one, but TWO furruses (Ada and Lucy) present at the party which made it way more bublibicious! Ada was jumping on my lap the whole evening, and Lucy was staying under the table, making sure Brian does not leave without her.
2. Second, my husband cooked an eight course dinner for me and my friends.
3. Third, I felt truly loved. Everyone's toasts were touching and humbling at the same time. I got lots of hugs and lots of kind words (some of which could probably be attributed to the existence of the scoreboard with everyone's name on it).

The planning really started few weeks ago when I decided to buy a dining table that can expand to seat twelve people. Once the table arrived, I got all kinds of ideas about what to put on it. The ideas continue coming in and I already know this table is going to be put into heavy use.

You can see it with your own eyes in the following time lapse from my birthday dinner. Pump up the volume:

The table inspiration came from Pinterest. How close did I get to the inspiration?

After I made the custom tablecloth, I knew the rest was all about adding a ton of flowers, gold and bling! The flowers came from SF Flower Market (where I managed to buy them in spite of being talked to only in Spanish) and I arranged them the day of the party. The cupcakes came from Julie, who designed them for Baker and Banker herself! They were fantastic white chocolate raspberry ganache filled pieces of heaven!

People nearest and dearest to my heart were there:

Guests knew they will get points for wearing salmon/gold attire to match the table. What I did not expect, however, was that this point collecting game will continue through the night and we will end up everyone competing for points on the scoreboard. People got points for the weirdest things. Aria got five points for taking Ada out for a walk. With three toasts which included a dancing toast, Erin totally earned the first place:

And now onto the food. As is common with Brad's cooking, the dinner was partially improvised but the main ideas were set ahead of time. The courses were:

1. ceviche
2. beef tataki
3. summer squash and red lentil soup with chicken, creme fraiche, scallions and chives
4. arugula salad with spring corn and foie gras vinaigrette
5. seared foie gras with frisee, crostini, and mango chutney
6. intermezzo (coconut sorbet with strawberries)
7. main course (salmon with glazed carrots)
8. dessert (Julie's cupcakes and a cheese plate) 

As is common with me, I properly photographed all eight courses:

After reviewing the footage from the time-lapse camera upstairs, I discovered a few gems that show just how much fun we all had. It even looks like Brian and Alex were ready to take it outside at some point. :)

Big thanks to my wonderful manus for treating his ladus like a queen and cooking for us all! Also, big thanks to Tess who was helping Brad make this dinner go smoothly.

Istanbul for Photographers

Istanbul is an exciting place for photographers. Just imagine all the colorful bokeh you can get at the places like Grand Bazaar or a Blue Mosque! Here are few places that are worth bringing your camera to. But first let's start with a short stopmotion that shows them all!

And now onto the photos of my favorite places to photograph:

#1 Grand Bazaar

Bazaar offers lots of cheap (read "low quality crap from China") trinkets that try to present themselves as something made by Turkish artisans. It's fun to photograph, but probably not worth the buy. The best shop I found at the Bazaar was a Belgian Godiva chocolate shop where I got delicious skewer of chocolate covered strawberries. I also bargained few scarves for my girlfriends, which ended up costing more than the same merchandise in SF Chinatown. But the bargaining was fun.

You will see lots of caterers carrying turkish tea to the shop owners. The black tea is very bitter, but tastes delicious with one cube of sugar. There is a good chance that a shop owner will offer you some tea while trying to convince you to buy a carpet.

#2 Topkapi Palace

Topkapi palace was a home to many Ottoman sultans. It has an unusual layout for someone who is used to seeing European castles and palaces. It looks more like a monastery than a palace but worry not. There are lots of great things to photograph. Its Harem for example.

The Harem contains lots of rooms, courtyards, and even Sultan's private apartment. This is the top of his bed:

And this is Sultan's ceiling:

Another interesting building within the compound is the old Imperial Council hall. This is what the entrance looks like:

Once you enter the imperial council hall, you'll see these gorgeous ceiling paintings:

#3 Hagia Sophia

This former church turned into mosque turned into museum challenges your exposure skills. The bottom part is covered with bright chandeliers, and the top part is dark. However, one can not use a tripod and thus can not create a good HDR image that would expose every part of the church evenly. I suggest you bring a bag of beans or a bag filled with packing noodles, and use it as a makeshift floor tripod. I made a mistake bringing my tripod and had to leave it in the security booth. These shots are all done hand-held.

#4 Basilica Cistern

This underground wonder took our breath away. Tripods were not allowed, which made me use my do-it-yourself makeshift tripod which consisted of laying the camera on the floor and propping the lens with my lip balm. As you can imagine, tourists were walking by me wondering why I am kneeling on the floor and waiting during for long exposure to end.

At the very back of the cistern, you'll find two columns with medusa heads at the base.

#5 Blue Mosque

This mosque is fully operational and you can enter it only outside of the prayer hours. You won't need much time to take few shots, as you are not allowed to roam around the whole mosque. All visitors must stay in the back part of the mosque which is separated by a railing. The admission is free, which is another plus.

#6 Streets of Istanbul

You will most likely spend more time in the streets of Istanbul than inside of the tourist attractions. Take advantage of this and practice some street photography. My favorite streets were around Beyoglu district, just on the other side of Galata Bridge.

Winter fruit is offered on every corner. Make sure to get a delicious pomegranate or orange juice.

Confused tourists make great subjects!

When you walk the Galata Bridge at night, you can prop your camera on a curb and get this shot:

Istanbul is definitely a must-see place for photograpers. The next time I visit this city I will make sure to bring a super wide lens, to allow me to capture the Grand Bazaar and mosques even better. If you visited Istanbul, I'd like to see your photos. You can share them in the comments below.

Nine Courses, Ten Bottles of Wine, and One Broken Chair

This year's Thanksgiving has been quite an experience. It was the first time that Brad and I held a formal nine course dinner at our home. Let's just say, the number of forks we needed to eat all this food with exceeded the number of forks we own... and we own a lot of forks (48).

 The menu was a bit unorthodox. The traditional turkey dinner was preceeded by a few non-Thanksgiving but still very seasonal courses and little amuse bouches.

We started off with champagne and soon moved onto Riesling which paired perfectly with the little amuse bouche Brad whipped out using beets, carrots, and goat cheese.

 The bubli bouche was followed by an appetizer -- a foie gras au torchon which I made with Emil earlier. Emil's wine choice, a rose, paired perfectly with the foie.

The foie dish was followed by my famous cheesy leek soup (it's really my mom's recipe but shhhh). Paired with a glass of pinot. The soup was the winning dish of the evening. Notice that I almost forgot to take a photo of the soup (I took few spoons before I realized I need to photograph it)... that's how good it was.

In the meantime, Lucy, the gray furrus, was trying to pull down the turkey from the counter. She eventually succeeded, but thankfully it was AFTER we served the turkey dinner.

Emil and Brad carefully selected the right wine to match every course.

The next unexpected amuse bouche came out of the oven shortly after. It was hard to tell what it was but it tasted like cheese fritata with whole cloves of roasted garlic. It was a heavy hitter.

Everyone seemed to be having fun.

Another popular amuse bouche slash bubli bouche -- a shrimp and cinnamon apple skewer.

Lucy continued on her quest to eat all the food on the counter.

A small salad of arugula, seared turkey liver, shallots, and pomegranate.

The leftover pomegranate made a great addition to our fall harvest bowl.

In the meantime, Lucy plotted her next "counter" attack (no pun intended).

And she succeeded! Brad made a mistake and left a mushroom mac and cheese cooling in the guest room. The muffin pan had twelve slots. Lucy incorrectly assumed one must be for her.

Brad's mom (the lady with the nice hair) seemed to enjoy the evening as well.

Emil brought a nice glass decanter for the anticipated red wine pairings.

One more little intermezzo to cleanse the palate before the turkey dinner -- a lemon sorbet with blueberry sauce and blackberry.

Emil's (well, now mine) decanter in action.

Voila! A traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner. On the plate, clockwise from top: mashed potatoes, evil mac and cheese, turkey with gravy, maple whipped sweet potatoes with hazelnut shallot parsley brown butter, Brad's evil stuffing, and some cranberry sauce.

Hazelnut shallot parsley brown butter in detail:

After seven hours (!!!) and one false fire alarm we finally moved onto the dessert -- Julie's famous pumpkin pie!

And to top things off, Brad and I broke a chair together when we both sat on it at the same time. Hey, that's a perfect excuse to buy more Eames wire chairs!

I hereby declare to the best of my knowledge that this Thanksgiving extravaganza was a success!

Announcing The Stopmotionista (Hey, that's me!)

As many of you noticed, a new link has been added to the main page. It leads to my new website that is all about stop motion. I also have been recently interviewed by the lovely Catherine Hall and her co-host Leo Laporte on Twit Photo about my work. Click on the thumb below to view the interview. I'm explaining how I shoot and edit my stop motions:

My new site is meant to be a resource for all things stop motion. I even put together few short videos with instructions on how to shoot short stop motion sequences. Excuse the poor sound quality and the lack of my speaking persona... I'm working on both. :)

I'd like to invite you all to share your creations with me and would love to feature them on the Stopmotionista. The site also offers a Forum -- a place to talk about anything and everything, ask questions, or give suggestions. Come and visit me there. :)

2000 Photos In 3 Minutes

A friend sends you 2000 photos from her recent vacation. Are you are going to look at every single one? Let's be honest. Who wants to see other people's vacation photos? Nobody. Except, one thousand people wanted to see mine. What did I do to make them want to do so?

Congratulations! You just looked at 2000 photos in three minutes. Phew!

I came back from business trip to France last week and had twelve thousand photos on my hard drive. I was not going to edit them all and upload them into a giant album. But I also did not want to throw them away. I decided to make them interesting enough for my friends to want to look at them.

How can you do it?

Here is my "unconference demo" from Google+ Photographer Conference and an interview for Photo Talk Plus. Written instructions are below these two videos.

Some people pointed out that this technique is not a stop motion as it does not match the definition. Some pointed out that it's more of a time lapse. I am using both teqniques in my videos and calling it time-motion or stop-lapse isn't appealing.

There are many tools and many sites explaining how to make stop motion videos. Trey Ratcliff also put together a great screencast with instructions. You can use any tools you like, as long as you follow the steps below:

1.  Take lots of very similar photos 

In order to make your stop motion "flow", take tons of photos of the same thing. Use various techniques to make every image slightly different.

• Move camera slightly between every shot.
• Circle around subjects, or move the camera towards or away from the subject.
• Move your subject between every shot. If the subject is a person, let them walk towards or away from the camera. Photograph people walking, dancing, jumping, etc.

To see more techniques, check out my how to videos on stopmotionista.com.

If you travel, don't forget to photograph while you are in transport. Travel videos look better if you show the whole journey, including the airports and trains.

2. Optional: Reorder and crop

In an ideal world, you don't need to reorder the photos. Chronologic videos are great and show your journey accurately. But you will often find yourself in a situation when you need to swap some photos to make the story flow better.

Cropping might be needed if you want to create a true HD video which requires an aspect ratio of 16:9. However, if you are happy with the aspect ratio of the photos straight out of the camera (4:3 or 6:4), you can skip the cropping. YouTube will then pad your final video will black stripes on the left and right.

3. Save resized images with new file names

After you reorder the photos in your favorite photo editor (Lightroom, Picasa), you need to rename them so that they keep the new order after they are sorted by the file name. If you have photos from two or more cameras, synchronize them by time and then export (save) with new names containing sequence numbers. I used Adobe Lightroom to do this.

Lightroom allows me to automatically resize all images while saving them with new names. The above video was generated from photos that were 720 pixels wide. It's decent enough for viewing on a small laptop or an iPhone. For better resolution, pick 1280x720. I did however keep the original 6:4 aspect ratio and you should see black stripes on the left and right of the frame.

This is what a renamed file sequence would look like. As you can see, it sorts nicely by file name.

4. Convert the photo sequence into a movie file 

Convert the photo sequence into a video file. I used an advanced function "Open Image Sequence" in QuickTime Player 7 do this (the license cost $30 but it's totally worth it). QuickTime will then ask you to select a frame rate. I picked 12 frames per second. After you choose the frame rate, you'll be presented with your stopmotion video. It will be silent, but it will already look cool. :) Congratulations! Pat yourself on a back, save it into a .mov file and move onto the next step!

5. Optional: Add magic

You can stop now and enjoy your silent movie or you can continue editing your video further.

The next thing you probably want to do is to add sound. Pick an upbeat song to match the fast frame rate of the video. I found this amazing song by We Like Monsters and it matched my video perfectly! You can find free tracks at jamendo.com and freemusicarchive.org.

After you select a song, you'll realize that the length of the song does not match the length of the movie. It seems like you'd need to trim one or the other. It's easier to shorten few long movie sequences in order to make the movie match the song length. I used iMovie for this job.

iMovie also lets you insert a sequence with animated globe which enhances travel videos with facts about where you traveled from and where you traveled to. Just click on the globe icon on the bottom right of your iMovie app.

6. Upload to YouTube

Upload your movie to YouTube with the highest possible resolution. It might take longer, but you wouldn't need to be frustrated with poor quality once you watch it on YouTube.

7. Tell them

Tell all your friends about your new video. While you're at it, you can also share this blog post with them to show them how you did it. Trust me, they'll be asking.

Make sure to check out my main stopmotion site stopmotionista.com and if you feel crafty, also check out my "HOW TO" series to learn how to make other creative things.

And don't forget to send me links to your creations. I can't wait to see them!

Petra