More on My Food Photography

As mentioned in my weekly summary, I finally managed to purchase a camera, which will soon satisfy part of my new year's resolution to practice food photography. I'm pleased by the writing skills I've developed in writing my chocolate reviews, but I've always thought it a severe disadvantage that I haven't been able to post photos of the products. Furthermore, the lack of photos actually hold back the writing itself, as I absurdly have to resort to word descriptions where pictures would be better, and am prevented from using ideal wording by not being able to commentate on a graphical presentation. There's all sorts of other obstacles too, such as awkwardly commenting on the packaging when the linked product either has a different picture or no picture at all. As such, it's high time that I arrive at this point.

The camera is still shipping, but I do at least anticipate being able to use it by next Friday's review, hopefully. Aside from the photos I post on here, I'll also begin establishing a Flickr photostream, where I'll likely maintain a greater variety of photos of a product than presented in the article alone. You'll get links when the time comes.

Of course, my first few weeks might be pretty awkward. I have no experience with photography and have never handled a camera of this caliber. (I'll note the camera type in my About My Chocolate Reviews page when I start using it.) I've been unfruitful in finding a good educational source on photography, particularly for food. The only one on food that I could find assumed entirely a thorough knowledge of photography and instead concentrated on preparing the food. For now, I'm going for trial and error. I'm going to shoot the product atop a white satin pillow case for contrast and adjust my lighting with my OTT-Lite lamp. It might not be the best of practices, but we'll have to wait and see. Besides, I'm not in the sturdiest of finances right now, so I'll work my way up.

Additionally, I'm also considering rereviewing some chocolates I've done in the past. I want to do this not only because the photography ought to enhance them greatly, but also because I want to correct some amateurish mistakes I made in my early days when I wasn't all that skilled in both my tasting and review writing. Some chocolates, I think, are worth revisiting given more trained abilities.

I'm not sure if I'll post any other kind of photography, but I might. For now, my concentration is entirely on my chocolate reviews, though I plan on branching out to photographing my meal preparations as well, once I get to more serious culinary practice.

I'm glad to have reached this point. For a while I was afraid I might never be able to afford to go through with this new year's resolution, but good luck and a good price has helped me see it through. Better still, I've managed to restore my stocks of review fodder, so now I have several months worth of material to keep things steady, whereas I was just down to my last two bars a week ago.

My start may be sloppy, but I'm looking forward to getting to it. Hopefully you find that it makes my chocolate reviews more worthwhile than ever before.