Monthly Archives: December 2009

The Potluck Conundrum

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This past week, my coworkers organized a holiday potluck lunch. I’m not generally a big fan of potlucks, but I conceded to the the demands for a dish at the last minute. I had planned on making a double batch of my sister-in-law’s cheesy chili dip (a horribly delicious and simple combination of cream cheese, canned chili, and shredded cheddar). I had planned for a double batch because I knew that a single batch could disappear at the hands of 4-6 people watching a football game, and we were expecting 12-14 people at the potluck.

When I got home with the ingredients, I thought about the assumption that went into my estimate of taking a double batch. The fact that the recipe “served” 4-6 was based on my assumption that it was the only thing they were eating (or at least was the main thing they were pigging out on). Then I thought about what my coworkers would be doing: they would also be bringing something that could serve the whole group as if that was the primary thing they would eat, and that everyone would have some.

But that really isn’t the way potlucks work. People tend to get smaller portions of a lot of different things. This means that a dish that would normally serve a family of 4 as a main dinner entree would probably serve 12-16 people as a potluck serving. The other way to think about it is this: 10 people each bringing enough food for 12 people (assuming one person brought utensils, plates, napkins, etc, and another brought drinks). Thats food enough for 120 people. Even if you cut it in half, and people are estimating that they are bringing enough food for 6 people, that’s still food for 60, with only 12 to eat it.

So, ideally, each person should only bring as much as they could personally consume, or a little more. Heck, bring a double portion just to be sure no one goes hungry.

But what happens when everyone else brings a huge dish? Or what if your dish is really popular and everyone wants seconds? Then you look like a stingy scrooge. This is the “potluck conundrum”: bring enough to generously feed everyone and you’ll likely go home with tons of leftovers because everyone else will have done the same.

So, how did my cheesy chili dip go over? It was very popular among those who tried it, but only a couple of people had more than a few chip-fulls. When I got home, I still had 2/3 of the recipe remaining–not the doubled recipe, 2/3 of the standard recipe that would be a great football game treat for my family of 4. And that 2/3 is not an estimate–I actually measured the remains because I was curious. Boy am I glad I made just one batch.

Everything that people brought had a ton left over with one exception–the drinks, because only one person brought drinks, and he estimated the consumption reasonably well. There was one unused 2-liter remaining. One of the guys on the team, a young single Indian man, went to Whole Foods to buy a desert for the team. He bought an assortment of individual dessert cups. I think he bought something like 20 of them, and spent $38. I think 5 of them got eaten–I ate one just because I felt bad for him (it was delicious, but I was already stuffed). The same ratio was true for the other desserts: 75% remaining of the nutmeg cake, the brownies, the bouche de noel. Even the entrees had a sizable portion left over.

Now to be fair, I’ve seen some instances where this behavior didn’t hold as well. When there is a high compliance for bringing food, i.e. everyone brings something, there is a ton left over. When the group gets larger, and it isn’t as obvious if someone fails to bring something, then the food can run thin. We’ve seen this happen at multiple church events.

Volleyball Team Portrait

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When I originally tried to shoot a team portrait for my daughter’s volleyball team, it just didn’t work out. The coach promised that we would get together in a few weeks, but I was skeptical. I was pretty convinced that the team portrait would never come together.

Yesterday, all the moons and planets aligned, and we got 20 of the 21  team members, the two coaches, and me in the same room. Six shots later, I have a team portrait.

1/50 sec, f/7.1 ISO 400

I’m reasonably pleased with the result. As a parent, I’m most disappointed by the fact that the team members aren’t in uniform. I’ve never seen a team portrait where the team members were in street clothes. Oh well. As a photographer, there are a lot of lessons learned for me. Stop reading now if you don’t want to see me beating myself up Tyler Durden style.

First comes the excuse-making:

  • Team time in front of the camera: 4 minutes. The team wasn’t even in the room until I had less than 10 minutes before they had to head toward their buses.
  • Though the coach and I had planned on me having 30 minutes with the team, they showed up with only 10 minutes to shoot, and the coach took the first 3-4 minutes reminiscing.

Now the lessons learned:

  • I didn’t confirm details of where I was going to shoot them prior to my arrival. I had assumed I would do the shoot in the gymnasium/auditorium. When I got to the school, I learned that the basketball team would be in the gym for practice right at the end of my shoot time. Initially I thought I could cope with this conflict, and I started setting up to shoot in the gym. My dear wife convinced me otherwise, and now I think that was a wise decision–to not have to worry about basketballs hitting my gear as I was trying to tear down was an excellent thought. As a result, the shot was done in a dance studio, that fortunately, looks a lot like a gym.
  • In my initial test shots, I noticed specular highlights on the wall that was to be the background. That was because the brick was glazed and shiny. I hoped it would be absorbed by the team, but I was wrong. I suspect it might have been alleviated with umbrellas, but I only had one (more on that below) and chose in the last minutes to not use it. The highlights are still visible in the final result, and it will probably bug me forever that I’m not good enough with photo editing tools to get rid of it.
  • Prior to the shoot, I suspected that I needed additional lighting gear, but I didn’t want to borrow my friends gear again, and I didn’t feel like renting gear for a shot where I wasn’t getting paid. That probably isn’t the best attitude on my part–if I ever want to get paid (maybe, I’m still not sure) I need to treat every shoot as if I were getting paid. My unwillingness to use anything but my own gear resulted in a lower quality shot.
  • I had flashes far camera left and far camera right. The flash on the left is under-powered compared with the one on the right, and it was my LumoPro LP120, set at 1/4 power. It would have taken 10 seconds to walk over to it and change it to 1/2 power. That would have reduced the shadows on the right side of the team.
  • I don’t like the haphazardness of the first row: arms and legs all over the place, and my daughter looks 6 inches shorter than the rest because she is slouching. I needed to take more care with their poses.
  • A couple of the kneeling folks in the middle row are slouching or leaning forward too far. I corrected one of them in a later shot, but by then the young women in the front row were starting to goof off. This is a better over-all shot despite the slouchers.
  • The shot is a little fuzzier than I would like. That could have been helped by a) faster shutter, b) smaller aperture, or c) tripod. My tripod was being used as a light stand (see above about not borrowing gear), and changes in shutter and aperture would have reduced the ambient, accentuating the shadows. Not good for this kind of shot.

What I did right:

  • The exposure and white balance look correct. Now some of that was helped with some tweaking in the digital negative (raw file), but I got it close enough in camera for the result to require only minor tweaks. The flashes were gelled with green to balance them toward fluorescent, which was my ambient, and camera white balance was set to fluorescent.
  • The height of the rows look pretty decent. The tallest were in the front row, shortest in the middle row, remaining in the back row. It might have been better to put the shortest in back, and the middle height in the middle row, but there wasn’t much separation in height after I got the tallest ones on the floor.
  • They are all smiling as much as their personalities allow.
  • Their eyes are all open. This, however, was luck. I looked at the images on the back of the camera, but I doubt I zoomed enough to check the eyes.
  • The back ground is about as clean as I could get it. There had been stuffed toys on the window sills in the background, but I moved them before the shoot. A couple were in this final shot right at the edge, but I was able to remove them in post-processing.

All in all, I gave myself the beating I think I deserve if I want to do better. I think the shot is pretty decent considering the constraints (4 minutes) and my experience (not too much). The next question is do I have the intestinal fortitude to put it in the Critique My Shot Forum to see what other photographers think?

Ah yes, I’m a glutton for punishment.

T-shirt Fail

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Today while doing some Christmas shopping, Anne and I came across a shirt that I really wanted–it was a black t-shirt with a sketch of one of the monsters from Where the Wild Things Are, my favorite childhood book. Along the bottom of the shirt was the quote “Let the wild rumpus begin”.

I thought about that for a moment. I tried to ignore the voice in my head saying “something just ain’t right”. I showed the shirt to Anne and exclaimed “How cool is this!” But then I just couldn’t ignore it any longer: “Isn’t the line in the book ‘let the wild rumpus start’?” She was pretty sure it was “start” not “begin” also. I just couldn’t buy the shirt with the lingering fear that the quote was wrong, so we went to a nearby bookstore to confirm the quote. Yup, we were right, and the idiots at Warner Brothers who made the shirt couldn’t even get it right. T-shirt Fail.

Maybe the line was changed in the movie, and it is “Let the wild rumpus begin” and it wasn’t an edit failure. OK, then it is a script writing failure. The book has maybe 100 words. I can totally understand expanding on the book, but there is no good reason to change the most iconic quote of the book.

LOL! OMG!

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Tonight was Girl Scouts night at my house. The usual 12-14 year-old-characters descended upon our family room for a couple of hours and worked on the strategy for a fund raising project. I’ve known several of these young women since they were in kindergarten. I was joking around with one of them a bit as I was passing near by, and for some reason, I can’t recall why (its that age thing) I said to her “LOL! OMG!” She looked at me with a smirk and said “Do you even know what that means?” I replied “I knew what LOL meant before you were born!”

HA!

Ha.

Hrm. Crap, am I really that old? What shocks me isn’t that I’ve been familiar with “LOL” since circa 1996. What shocks me is that I’m so old that I’ve just used the before-you-were-born retort.

“Take that you whipper snapper! And git off my lawn with yer loud music!”