Oh dear. I was just about to expound on why Valentine's Day is my least-favourite "Hallmark Holiday" (that is, the one that tugs on every guilt string in order to sell clichéd goods at hyper-inflated prices) when I realised... I did that schtick last year.

Ooops.

The reality still holds, though; I still think it's vastly better to celebrate days which have meaning to a couple, in ways that have meaning to the couple, than it is to celebrate prescribed days in prescribed ways. There is of course nothing wrong with doing something on Valentine's Day, it can be a bit of fun or it can be just an excuse to set aside some time for something romantic... but I tend to ignore it.

Don't read too much into the metaphor of the cleaved heart with the strawberry filling oozing out; it's more a metaphor for the Valentine Industry cleaving open your wallet and sucking it dry than any metaphor for a broken heart. After all, the other one is still in tact. Aside from which I think I need to get a smaller knife for shots like these, the standard knife is a touch disproportionate.

This one wasn't all that easy to do because candlelight can be a bear to use when the naked flame is exposed. It doesn't generate enough light to light the scene but generates too much light and becomes just a white blob if the exposure is too long. I tried bouncing the flash off the ceiling as I have in the past but that cost too much of the candle's warmth so I compromised; I held a wad of white tissues over the flash as it fired to diffuse the light but still let enough through so that I wasn't dependent on the candle for all of the lighting.

Last Year