Indoor creative winter photography

This series of photos all began with me slicing a pineapple for the morning fruit smoothie. A running joke in our kitchen centers around me noticing photographically attractive patterns such as in red onions or a bunch of pumpkin seeds. In this case it was the inner core of a pineapple stem.

Cut pineapple stem

I noticed the patterns in the cut stem of the pineapple and decided to photograph it with my macro lens, trying to accentuate the circular concentric patterns.

When finished I moved the camera and tripod to the living room. The camera happened to be facing the Christmas tree. I noticed the electronic viewfinder on my Z7, being still active, was showing me out of focus blue and white images of the Christmas tree lights that the lens happened to be pointing at. Aha! Another photo opportunity. I started making a few exposures of the out of focus lights, changing the focus to make them larger or smaller. I kept the aperture wide open so as to render the lights as circular images.

Christmas tree lights, out of focus, wide aperture

Christmas tree lights, alternate focus

Then I remembered the Z7 has the capability of combining images with a technique called Image Overlay. I proceeded to photograph some of the Christmas tree ornaments using normal focus and then I combined selected images with the out of focus tree lights using the Overlay method.

Tree lights and hanging Santa ornament

The composite image

This is the type of thing that can keep me as a photographer busy whilst indoors (a rainy winter day here today) so long as I am open to the visual possibilities existing around me. Being observant and willing to experiment led me to produce these indoor photos. While my primary interest is nature photography, I consider myself a photographer first.

Happy Holidays!