Smoking the Thanksgiving Turkey

As I do out here in California I smoked the turkey (hot-smoked, not cold-smoked for the aficionados out there) for Thanksgiving last week. Nothing particularly fancy, soak some wood chips while the charcoal lights, then put 'em in a foil packet and let the bird cook at a fairly low heat while the smoke does the work. I mention it mainly because the smoke was swirling prettily out of the grill and I had some time to catch a few photos of it.

Smoking the Thanksgiving Turkey


There are a couple more on Flickr if you like this one.

One thing that surprised me was I could only see the smoke from one side. I tried taking shots from the other side so there was an orange tree in the background but the smoke disappeared. My completely fabricated explanation for this is that the smoke particles must be sort of teardrop-shaped and the wind orients them in a particular manner. The light was fairly directional (these were shot close to noon, but at this time of the year the sun is pretty southern), so from some angles the smoke doesn't reflect as much light? Anyways, I liked these pictures, and it motivated me to import stuff from the memory card. I still have those Point Bonita Lighthouse pictures to work on.