Spice Story

Spice Story, originally uploaded by BCMielke.

I would normally have titled this Photo of the Day: Waukesha, WI. Thankfully Penzey's spice gave me a good story though.

I traveled to Wisconsin for work and thought it might make a nice picture to take some pictures of spices in my favorite spice store, Penzey's. I have been a fan of their spices for some time. They used to work out of a store where they mixed up the spices and my thinking was that it would make for a quick photo-op with the LX3.

I arrived at the store/factory and found that they store had moved. The hand written in Sharpy marker told me that they have moved to a certain address. No other information was give. Since I was just off the main highway which they Sharpy sign mentioned I started looking for a shop amongst all of the other stores located on this stretch of road.

Well I couldn't find it. I went up and down the road twice, now some may wonder why I wouldn't just whip out the iPhone and use the included map. Well I'm a man.

Finally I did just that and of course the store was spotted immediately. I entered the store, picked up some spices and then started scoping for some neat pictures with the LX3. I clicked off about 5 pictures of spices adorning shelves, none of which was very photogenic. I was a little disappointed and was just about to pack it in and see if I could grab something later in the day when a woman approached me.

My thoughts as I planned out today's photo was to put this up and rave about Penzey's spices. Put a link to their site on my blog, Well the female security officer asked me to not take pictures while in the store. She was nice about it, but frankly it's a spice store. I asked her if she wanted "free" advertising explained what I was doing. She told me they had a Marketing department for that.

My first thought was that you are a catalog place, you send me and thousands of others a catalog to remind us to look at purchasing spices. That is all the marketing that they do.

I had a half of mind to thank the lady for making my blog at least a bit more interesting than a fanboy reaction to Penzey's spices. I refrained though.

This suspicious photo was taken with the Panasonic LX3. I sneakily converted the RAW file using the DNG converter and brought the file deviously into Photoshop CS3 where I finished it with great guile in Nix Color Efex 3.