Ingredients: beetroot, nuts, knife, chopping board, camera, macro adaptor, LED light

This afternoon I prepared a dish with butternut squash and chopped nuts and I also roasted some beetroot at the same time. Then it struck me that I might have a candidate image for my 52photos project. Attaching my Raynox 250 macro adaptor to the end of the 50mm lens on my Nikon D40 further reduced what was already diminishing light but I used a handheld LED torch to make up the difference and allow me to capture the image handheld.

I’ve done some processing on the image, to cast it into a widescreen (16:9) format, to tweak the colours and to boost the sharpness of the details. I also used one of those artistic filters again but with a little more subtlety than Friday’s image. Here I applied the oilify filter but used a layer mask to blend it into the blurred areas. Look closely at the crumb above the small hole the board and you will see blobs of solid colour compared to the graduation on the original. You will probably have to compare the original sized images though – this time I didn’t want to make the effect obvious.

And, yes, it probably is about time I got a new chopping board. It does get a good clean after sessions but, as well as lots of cuts and a few little holes developing, there is a significant fault line developing along what must have been a glued seam. I’m quite tempted by something like the ‘obsessive chef‘ board. We’ll see…