Writing 101: Photos gone horribly wrong

Today’s post is a riff between Day 15 and 16’s assignments. Well, not exactly, but after a rough weekend I decided it was time to write. I thought a lot about food photography lately. Having been sick for the past few days, the only thing I felt like doing is watching cooking and food photography videos. Yes, I’m constantly thinking about food, even when I feel off. Wierd, I know. So what I want to do eventually, is to jot some points down and turn them into an article, kind of like the one I wrote on cookbooks. It’s all up in the air at this stage, but I really want to write it.

In this post I want to grant one request which was recently sent to me by a fellow blogger, whom I got to know through Blogging Uni. A few weeks ago, Sav from Sav & The City wrote some lovely words on one of my photos and asked me if I would mind going through some shots that I was never, ever, going to publish.

Dear Sav, I might mind a little tiny bit, but you asked so kindly, I just couldn’t refuse. I never thought I would see this day. (The photo above is kind of OK, I mean I’ve seen worse, but if you were asking me what that dark-looking pillar on your top right, well, that’s my bottle of EVOO. Looking horrible.)

I’m plucking some courage and opening my terrible photo file. I will go through it and see what I find in there. I don’t really want to but sometimes it’s good to come out of my comfort zone, so here we go!

OK, so this is supposed to be a photo of an egg sandwich. Where’s the egg though? One of the cons I find of being a food blogger and taking the pics yourself this: I make my lunch as quickly as I can (because I have been writing all morning and when I hear my tummy rumbling I realise that I haven’t eaten anything yet). Then before it gets cold, I grab my camera and start shooting without thinking. The settings remain the same but I take my photos without a tripod so most often than not I lose the focus, as in the camera’s focus. Well, mine too for that matter! So inevitably here you barely see the egg, which defeats the purpose of the shoot.

For me, cakes are the easiest things to photograph, but I bet you wouldn’t have thought that when looking at that Orange Drizzle Cake. And I wouldn’t blame you for one second. I mean, just look at it (or not), it’s totally out of focus, and by that I mean it’s a mess. I could have taken my time here, but we were hosting a gathering and I was too focused on feeding people. Excuse the silly pun. The only redemptive reality here is that the cake was almost gone by the time I tried to take a shot at this. Happy days!

The last one, at least for today because I can barely look should have been a clear shot of a pasta dish I made on a whim with whatever I could find in the fridge that day. This happens all the time, especially when I want to use up any veggies to make room for fresher ingredients. I seem to be always in a rush, something I need to work on. (I can clearly see a pattern by now.) One question you might ask here is “where on Earth is the pasta?” I promise you, it *is* somewhere in there, but I can’t see it either. This is one mistake I make most often. I bend down a little too much and poof, there goes a terrible shot.

So, that’s it. I have plenty more but I’m quite happy to keep the rest locked up in my folder. Never, ever to see the light of day. At least, that’s my plan for now…

Thanks again to Sav for the request. To be honest, I really enjoyed this.

Rob.

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