I visited my family in Charlotte, North Carolina over Thanksgiving. Pleasantly, my brother Adrian was able to come too— in the past few years, Adrian had been living in Cape Town and hadn’t been able to make it to Thanksgiving.
I really debated which lens to shoot, whether my 50mm f/1.4 or my 17–55 f/2.8 IS. Theoretically, the 50mm could let in heaps more light (and potentially allow for sharper shots), but on the other hand, the image stabilization of my 17‐55 does quite well toward reducing camera shake too.
In the end, I went with my 50mm, although I’m not sure that was my best option. Sure, the 50mm f/1.4 could theoretically let in four times as much light (2 stops) as the 17–55mm f/2.8, but as I was processing the photos later, I came to realize that IS often provided more than two stops of stabilization. So, for example, shooting at f/1.4 at 1/30sec on my 50mm often resulted in blurry shots, but if one takes the equivalent exposure of f/2.8 at 1/6sec, I know my image stabilization would be able to handle at least some of those.
At this point, you might be thinking, “f/1.4 at 1/30sec? That sounds like a ton of light.” And with a more modern camera it probably would be. But with my 4-year-old Canon 40D, I can’t really go above about ISO 400 without running into serious noise issues. So while you 5D Mark II shooters probably don’t give a second thought to shooting at ISO 800 or even ISO 1600, those options are pretty much out of bounds for me.
All told, I did enjoy the freedom—as it were—of not having to worry about zooming my lens to compose a shot (since one can’t with that lens) and the 50mm is also considerably lighter as well. So perhaps I might lean toward my 17–55mm the next time I shoot that type of scene.
Camera fiddly bits aside, I believe we had fourteen people for Thanksgiving (including my family), which is a pretty good number, but not altogether as many people as we had last year. Because some of our relatives were driving in from out of town and we weren’t quite sure if they might run into traffic along the way, we asked guests to come over around 4:30/5:00.
As we’ve done in past years, we cooked our turkey on the grill over the course of several hours—like usual, my dad put the bird on around 2:30 or 3:00. On some of our previous Thanksgivings, we asked guests to come over nearabouts that time, which allowed for a couple hours of chatting and nomming hors d’oeuvres while the bird cooked. With guests coming over a bit later this year, we had slightly less gabbing time before the turkey was ready.
What I came to realize later is that the hour or two of pre-turkey chit-chat is when I would ordinarily take most of the day’s photos. And with this year’s shortened carousing time, maybe I should have been quicker on the draw to get a few more photos in. But mentally I was still on the timeline of previous years and so I kinda dropped the ball on some of my picture taking.
Picture stuff aside, I still had a great Thanksgiving—everyone was super nice, we were all in good spirits, and hardly anyone talked about politics. (Thanksgiving sans political banter? Mon Dieu!) Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, but this was one of the best I’ve had in a long time.
