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sarea
One of the things I really like about keeping a food blog is not just the enjoyment I get from the making and eating of food, but how it's developed my appreciation and love of photography -- specifically food photography, because obviously different kinds of photography take different kinds of methods and skill.
Keeping a food blog is not an easy business in today's food-obsessed world. I do it mainly for myself and friends, to share (and easily retrieve) recipes I've tried and liked, but also because I love food and certain recipes so much that I want to spread the love, to spread the enjoyment of that food to others, to encourage them to make something because I think they and the people they know will be made happy from it. It's about spreading happiness! However, food is a very visual thing, especially online when we don't yet have smell-o-vision or any way to express how delicious something is other than with a photo. Thus food bloggers have to distinguish themselves by having to be just as good at food photography as they are cooks -- maybe better. Take Tartelette. Both K and I agree that Tartelette takes the most AMAZING photos. She can make a simple bowl of eggs look like a million dollars. Very rarely do we actually want to make any of the food she posts about, but boy do we like looking at her pictures. The thing is, I don't really want a food blog like that, where the photography surpasses the food itself. I want the photography to be part of what entices someone into wanting to EAT that food, and I think there's a fine line between doing that and making the photo so composed and beautiful that it's more about the photo than the food.
Because I'm lucky enough to have a good camera, I generally don't have to make a huge effort to make my photos at least decent. My food photos improved dramatically just by switching from a regular point-and-shoot to a DSLR. However, I've also learned that the adage, "It's not the camera, it's the photographer" is mostly true. I say "mostly" because I know for a fact that having a better camera did help me take better photos without me knowing a thing about how a camera operates. BUT it's also true that someone with true photography skill could take better pictures with a crappy camera than someone who didn't know what they were doing with the best camera in the world. At first, because my food photos got so much better just from using a better camera, I didn't think I had to bother to learn anything about it. But it wasn't long before those photos stopped looking as good as they had initially, and I wanted to get better. That's the curse and blessing of being human, I guess. It's hard to stay happy for long. :P You get used to something, so what once satisfied you, no longer does.
It was for this reason that I signed up for the Winter Food Photography class at The Pantry at Delancey. The class was at the end of January, but I didn't talk about it here because I found the class rather disappointing. The class was "taught" by a husband and wife team. The husband was a wedding photographer (which, sad to say, didn't really inspire a lot of confidence, just because the common belief is that photographing weddings is the "easiest" of all photography professions, what a photographer does to pay the bills when s/he can't get any other work -- but more than that, as I've said, different types of photography require different skills, and portrait photography is very different from food photography) while the wife was a food blogger who occasionally takes photos for Bon Appetit. She had the right credentials; unfortunately, of the two, he was a lot more personable and knowledgeable, and a much better presenter (though still not great), while she was soft spoken and a mumbler, and didn't really have much insight to share that I didn't already know from doing some reading on food photography online. They both might've been great photographers (I mean, you have to be pretty good to take photos for a food magazine), but they weren't great teachers. So yeah, I didn't feel that I got a lot out of the $80 session (whereas I felt that the $50 Knife Skills class was great).
What it did do, however, was introduce me to Adobe Lightroom (which is so freaking complicated omg) and spur me to do things that I could have and should have done before, such as 1) set up a mini "white room" (when I found out that white posterboard was so easily found at Target and for $0.39 I really could have kicked myself for delaying on it for so long); 2) got some 'props' from Goodwill; and 3) played with the white balance settings on my camera. I guess you could argue that that was worth $80, because I might never have done those things otherwise, but I was expecting a lot more from the class.
Anyway, because I did those things, I feel that my recent food photos are an improvement over my other post-DSLR photos, and definitely over my pre-DSLR photos. It's actually pretty amazing, because one of the things Ashley said in class that I didn't think applied to me was that, with practice, you only get better and better, to the point where you can't even look at your older photographs anymore. I didn't think that was true of myself, because I distinctly remember feeling really happy with my food photos back then. Yet because of Pinterest, I've been going back to my older posts to pin those photos, and more often than not, I find myself making faces and unable to bring myself to inflict Pinterest with them. Whereas I don't have the same doubts about my newer stuff.
One day that will probably change, too, and it's interesting that, just like a parent looking at his/her children, it's hard to be objective about whether one of my photos is actually attractive, or whether I just think it looks good because I took the photo, and it was of food that I'd made.
I admit that part of what I have trouble with is that I just don't have a very visual eye or a sense for decorating. I never know what will look good until I've taken the picture and just kind of make the judgment right then and there on whether the setup I had made a good photo or not (and then, when the answer is 'no,' I sometimes feel at a loss as to what the 'scene' needs to give it that extra something I want). Whereas others, like Tartelette, seem to just have a talent for visual beauty, to know how to pose a table and elements that go into the photo for maximum appeal. I guess I just hope that some of that comes with time and experience!
Recently, I came into some Meyer lemons. And what do you do when life hands you lemons? Preserve them! And make lemon cookies, of course! I took a few photos, using my new mini white room and a cloth placemat, that I am pretty happy with:
I can't imagine that one day I'll look at those and feel vaguely embarrassed, as I do when I look at some of my older photos, yet it'll probably happen. (Recipe for the preserved lemons is here and the recipe for the lemon ricotta cookies with lemon glaze is here btw.)
In comparison, here's a photo I took of different lemon cookies in Feb 2009, just a few months after getting my Nikon:
At the time, I was pretty darn proud of that photo! Now I'm like, "Eh."
On the far, far end of the spectrum, I was utterly appalled the other day when our business manager at work snapped a photo of my lemon cookies with her camera phone then sent it to every person in our group. It looked horrendous. It wasn't appetizing! It was the opposite of appetizing; it looked like ass. This is what I mean when I say that the camera does matter, especially a camera phone where you can only adjust the settings so much. This is what her photo looked like:
I mean... that's a photo of the exact same cookies as above! (Though granted taken on different days.) But one looks like an unappealing mess, while the other at least looks like something I might want to put in my mouth.
In real life, the cookies probably looked like something in between those two photos. They were just cookies (though delicious -- if you like lemon, and if you don't mind soft cookies, I highly rec them). Which brings up the interesting point that a good food photographer should be able to make the food look more appetizing, not less, in the photo. Is that "tricking" the reader? I don't think so, again because the visual element is all a blogger or magazine or whatever has to draw someone in. It makes someone call to mind that the food is yummy, which, if you're blogging about it, it probably is. So it's inciting the right feeling, which you might not be able to incite otherwise.
At a restaurant, the smells and the taste of the food matter more -- how it looks is less impactful, but I think we can all agree that food being visually appealing is important. I know when I've had food that tasted good but looked terrible, it decreased my enjoyment of it. In a more extreme example, I've read about how a lot of food photography is done when the food is par-cooked, because when fully cooked, it actually, on photos, looks over-cooked or burnt, or soggy, or limp, or what have you. This is true of things like roast chicken, or ribs, or certain vegetables, etc. So the food that looks so delicious in a magazine or in a cookbook, may actually be only half cooked! It's not surprising and doesn't bother me, because when you see/eat fully cooked items in real life, they don't look burnt or have the same problems. When we see the par-cooked items in print, it looks "normal" to us.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to eating and photographing lots more food, and getting better and better at it. Well, the photography part. I think I'm already an expert at the eating part. :P I just wish this were something I could get paid doing. But that's true of so many things I enjoy, sigh.
Keeping a food blog is not an easy business in today's food-obsessed world. I do it mainly for myself and friends, to share (and easily retrieve) recipes I've tried and liked, but also because I love food and certain recipes so much that I want to spread the love, to spread the enjoyment of that food to others, to encourage them to make something because I think they and the people they know will be made happy from it. It's about spreading happiness! However, food is a very visual thing, especially online when we don't yet have smell-o-vision or any way to express how delicious something is other than with a photo. Thus food bloggers have to distinguish themselves by having to be just as good at food photography as they are cooks -- maybe better. Take Tartelette. Both K and I agree that Tartelette takes the most AMAZING photos. She can make a simple bowl of eggs look like a million dollars. Very rarely do we actually want to make any of the food she posts about, but boy do we like looking at her pictures. The thing is, I don't really want a food blog like that, where the photography surpasses the food itself. I want the photography to be part of what entices someone into wanting to EAT that food, and I think there's a fine line between doing that and making the photo so composed and beautiful that it's more about the photo than the food.
Because I'm lucky enough to have a good camera, I generally don't have to make a huge effort to make my photos at least decent. My food photos improved dramatically just by switching from a regular point-and-shoot to a DSLR. However, I've also learned that the adage, "It's not the camera, it's the photographer" is mostly true. I say "mostly" because I know for a fact that having a better camera did help me take better photos without me knowing a thing about how a camera operates. BUT it's also true that someone with true photography skill could take better pictures with a crappy camera than someone who didn't know what they were doing with the best camera in the world. At first, because my food photos got so much better just from using a better camera, I didn't think I had to bother to learn anything about it. But it wasn't long before those photos stopped looking as good as they had initially, and I wanted to get better. That's the curse and blessing of being human, I guess. It's hard to stay happy for long. :P You get used to something, so what once satisfied you, no longer does.
It was for this reason that I signed up for the Winter Food Photography class at The Pantry at Delancey. The class was at the end of January, but I didn't talk about it here because I found the class rather disappointing. The class was "taught" by a husband and wife team. The husband was a wedding photographer (which, sad to say, didn't really inspire a lot of confidence, just because the common belief is that photographing weddings is the "easiest" of all photography professions, what a photographer does to pay the bills when s/he can't get any other work -- but more than that, as I've said, different types of photography require different skills, and portrait photography is very different from food photography) while the wife was a food blogger who occasionally takes photos for Bon Appetit. She had the right credentials; unfortunately, of the two, he was a lot more personable and knowledgeable, and a much better presenter (though still not great), while she was soft spoken and a mumbler, and didn't really have much insight to share that I didn't already know from doing some reading on food photography online. They both might've been great photographers (I mean, you have to be pretty good to take photos for a food magazine), but they weren't great teachers. So yeah, I didn't feel that I got a lot out of the $80 session (whereas I felt that the $50 Knife Skills class was great).
What it did do, however, was introduce me to Adobe Lightroom (which is so freaking complicated omg) and spur me to do things that I could have and should have done before, such as 1) set up a mini "white room" (when I found out that white posterboard was so easily found at Target and for $0.39 I really could have kicked myself for delaying on it for so long); 2) got some 'props' from Goodwill; and 3) played with the white balance settings on my camera. I guess you could argue that that was worth $80, because I might never have done those things otherwise, but I was expecting a lot more from the class.
Anyway, because I did those things, I feel that my recent food photos are an improvement over my other post-DSLR photos, and definitely over my pre-DSLR photos. It's actually pretty amazing, because one of the things Ashley said in class that I didn't think applied to me was that, with practice, you only get better and better, to the point where you can't even look at your older photographs anymore. I didn't think that was true of myself, because I distinctly remember feeling really happy with my food photos back then. Yet because of Pinterest, I've been going back to my older posts to pin those photos, and more often than not, I find myself making faces and unable to bring myself to inflict Pinterest with them. Whereas I don't have the same doubts about my newer stuff.
One day that will probably change, too, and it's interesting that, just like a parent looking at his/her children, it's hard to be objective about whether one of my photos is actually attractive, or whether I just think it looks good because I took the photo, and it was of food that I'd made.
I admit that part of what I have trouble with is that I just don't have a very visual eye or a sense for decorating. I never know what will look good until I've taken the picture and just kind of make the judgment right then and there on whether the setup I had made a good photo or not (and then, when the answer is 'no,' I sometimes feel at a loss as to what the 'scene' needs to give it that extra something I want). Whereas others, like Tartelette, seem to just have a talent for visual beauty, to know how to pose a table and elements that go into the photo for maximum appeal. I guess I just hope that some of that comes with time and experience!
Recently, I came into some Meyer lemons. And what do you do when life hands you lemons? Preserve them! And make lemon cookies, of course! I took a few photos, using my new mini white room and a cloth placemat, that I am pretty happy with:
I can't imagine that one day I'll look at those and feel vaguely embarrassed, as I do when I look at some of my older photos, yet it'll probably happen. (Recipe for the preserved lemons is here and the recipe for the lemon ricotta cookies with lemon glaze is here btw.)
In comparison, here's a photo I took of different lemon cookies in Feb 2009, just a few months after getting my Nikon:
At the time, I was pretty darn proud of that photo! Now I'm like, "Eh."
On the far, far end of the spectrum, I was utterly appalled the other day when our business manager at work snapped a photo of my lemon cookies with her camera phone then sent it to every person in our group. It looked horrendous. It wasn't appetizing! It was the opposite of appetizing; it looked like ass. This is what I mean when I say that the camera does matter, especially a camera phone where you can only adjust the settings so much. This is what her photo looked like:
I mean... that's a photo of the exact same cookies as above! (Though granted taken on different days.) But one looks like an unappealing mess, while the other at least looks like something I might want to put in my mouth.
In real life, the cookies probably looked like something in between those two photos. They were just cookies (though delicious -- if you like lemon, and if you don't mind soft cookies, I highly rec them). Which brings up the interesting point that a good food photographer should be able to make the food look more appetizing, not less, in the photo. Is that "tricking" the reader? I don't think so, again because the visual element is all a blogger or magazine or whatever has to draw someone in. It makes someone call to mind that the food is yummy, which, if you're blogging about it, it probably is. So it's inciting the right feeling, which you might not be able to incite otherwise.
At a restaurant, the smells and the taste of the food matter more -- how it looks is less impactful, but I think we can all agree that food being visually appealing is important. I know when I've had food that tasted good but looked terrible, it decreased my enjoyment of it. In a more extreme example, I've read about how a lot of food photography is done when the food is par-cooked, because when fully cooked, it actually, on photos, looks over-cooked or burnt, or soggy, or limp, or what have you. This is true of things like roast chicken, or ribs, or certain vegetables, etc. So the food that looks so delicious in a magazine or in a cookbook, may actually be only half cooked! It's not surprising and doesn't bother me, because when you see/eat fully cooked items in real life, they don't look burnt or have the same problems. When we see the par-cooked items in print, it looks "normal" to us.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to eating and photographing lots more food, and getting better and better at it. Well, the photography part. I think I'm already an expert at the eating part. :P I just wish this were something I could get paid doing. But that's true of so many things I enjoy, sigh.
