Holiday photo shoot, with few pictures

It was quite a day, last Wednesday. But the pictures (mine, at least, I trust the actual photographers did much better!) don't do it justice, even close. I think it was the waking at 3 a.m.--at least, that's the best I can think of... I was sleep deprived... yeah, that's it.

Anyway, we set up for Christmas first (above), and then ran through Thanksgiving (below, before we set it up all pretty-like). It was fun, kind of like catering in that it moved really quicky and time passed in a flash. Mostly I was pretty pleased with how golden I got the turkey. When you don't have to think about drying it out, is it done? isn't it done? you can just think about the color and crank the oven heat up and go!

One of the fun parts of the set-up was accummulating garnishes for the turkey. In "real life" I am just pleased to get the turkey to the table. But for photographic purposes, I referred to various publications like MS Living, Sunset, Gourmet and Bon Apetit, etc. The settings they featured ranged from quite rustic and bare to very elaborate. I aimed for middle of the road, and let the art directors pull off the platter any items they thought didn't work.

For the Christmas setting, I used sage and rosemary tucked in to the neck area, and bay leaves around the bottom, with halved little key limes and tamarillos and fresh cranberries for red accents (you can see that in the top picture--the tamarillos are the roma tomato-like fruit; I'd never used them before, and they were very pretty). For the Thanksgiving setting I used roasted garlic heads, halved lemons, mandarines and key limes, with lime leaves around the bottom. Oh and persimmons! It had a nice fall feel to it. The picture below is the Thanksgiving turkey garnish, just hanging out and waiting for the turkey...

All in all, a productive day! Next time, though, I will do better at getting some shots of the action...