Playing with Food

I’ve loved baking and cooking since I was little. My mom always made chocolate chip cookies from scratch, so those were one of the first things I ever learned to make. When I was a teenager I got really into photography. Almost every weekend I was begging my sisters or parents to take me to a local band’s show just so I could snap some photos. Even though my first blog was mostly about food, my love for photography and food never really crossed like I think I had hoped would happen naturally.

I do love sharing the occasional recipe on here when I come across something really good, but recently I was going through some of my old recipes and was really unhappy with the photos I had posted with most of them. I don’t expect myself to be some amazing food stylist and photographer, but I’ve really just been plain old lazy about my food photos – sometimes just rushing myself through them even when I didn’t have to.

One of my little goals this year is to really push myself with photography, and one of the things I already had in mind when making that goal was to really focus on improving my food photos. I love looking at food blogs with great photography, and even though this isn’t a food blog, when I do share recipes I love I want to be able to convey to everyone how great it really is.

I was experimenting with making a little cocktail last night and the house was pretty quiet so I decided it was time for me to really spend some time experimenting with a little styling and photography on it. Of course, the cocktail actually didn’t come out so well (much too strong, perhaps I’ll tweak and maybe share a recipe when I work it out) but I feel like I really did learn a lot from spending a good half hour doing nothing but taking photos of it. For one of the first times I really brought in some “props”, tried several different spots to play with lighting, and experimented with different angles. I took over 100 photos and the farther I got into looking at the photos, the better they really were (the ones up top are from the very end of my shooting). Now I’m really wandering why I never took this time before, why I’ve been so darn lazy!

I am certainly no Joy the Baker (and probably never will be), but I now realize how I need to do this more – slow down, think about things, experiment, and not afraid to try something new or different. Practice makes perfect – with everything, so why not dive in and have some fun?

Anyone else out there playing with food photography? Or really exploring any new area of photography!