Premier Anniversaire

Anniversaries, much as birthdays, beg for cake, I suppose. And today kind of marks one anniversary. A year ago I decided to start writing this blog. I had no clear idea of what I wanted to do, but for the fact that I sort of needed an outlet, a place where I could just post and showcase - and quite frankly, justify - the photographs I took. I have always had a certain soft spot for photography, but not all types of. While I quite obviously felt entranced by fashion photography - especially from magazines such as L'Officiel Paris - and photos of ballet shoes (go figure!), I mostly felt attracted to vignette photography. The whole of it, really. The choosing of the objects, the composing of the picture, the styling of the props, and then the photographing it from many angles, I was always quite attracted and fascinated by that. But for the longest time in my life I could not pursue my desire to play with that. For starters, I hail from way back when film was the norm. And it was expensive, as was the developing of said film. So it was quite a no-no for me and I always left my love for that kind of photography to the perusal of Marie Claire Idées, that had the best photos.

Then when the digital era came along, all I had for a camera were mobile phones. Not very good ones, and my photos never came out any good, though if you go way back on my instagram account you can find a little play I made with a tea set and scones and what not. I chose the object of my photo session, I composed the vignette, I styled the props and I shot away with my mobile. It's not bad, for a first effort, but I only wished I had had a good camera to make it look better. So when I finally got a good enough camera as a Christmas present in 2013, I was sold. And immediately I started playing around, and taking pictures of everything I could think off.  So it turned out that the primary object of this blog was not the sharing of recipes, per se, when I first started off, and that wasn't even a big part of it. It was mainly the styling of shoots and the sharing of those images that made up my imagination, it was really all about the playing with photos and mundane objects in order to create beauty. My fist posting of a recipe of sorts only happened on the third of April 2014, with a citrus polenta cake I was really proud of. I was already shy of two months into this blog. The next recipe was a cocktail and it took me twenty days to post. I was not into recipe sharing all that much, and I even used to share some of my outfits here, as well as beauty products I liked. All I wanted back then was the freedom to create and post, with no organization whatsoever nor thematics of any kind.

I was also only photographing on automatic. I confess to being affraid of making a mess out of my photos by going manual. I had the camera on automatic and just waited for the sun to shine on my dresser, which sits by the window in my bedroom and gets lovely light during Spring and Summer, and then created whatever vignette I wanted to photograph using the light I was getting. I sometimes got photos that were slighlty dark and grainy, other times the light exposure was so big it was like a white canvas all over the image. I did a lot of editing, both with Gimp and Pixlr Express, back in those days. I knew I was doing things wrong, and yet I felt so insecure of turning over to manual and learning how to work that camera, it took me so long and a blog post to do it. I decided I was being irrational by being so afraid of a camera setting, and one day, as I read a post Rebecca of The Clothes Horse did on photography, I felt it was high time I took the plunge. And am I glad I did. From that time on, it was an upwards spiral, really. I effed up plenty of times, I found myself imagining something in my mind's eye and when I tried to bring it to life it all went wrong, making me work harder, again and again at it, making me aware of my personal preferences in a way I had never thought of before. Making me want to learn, if only by instinct. You see, I'm a highly instinctive person, and that's how I work my best.

But I really wanted to learn more, and get better at it, take better photos, style better shoots, bring my vision and my imaginary world into this blog. All the while playing with food and concoting new and tasty recipes, I confess. Being always pressed for money - as I do not do this in any professional form whatsoever and it brings me no kind of income - I found my only ways to learn new tricks, besides working harder and more instinctively, was the perusal of blogs, many blogs, and Pinterest, as well as any classes I came across that were free. I took a couple of online classes, with Leela Cyd and Marte Marie Forsberg, and they were really helpfull. But mostly, I created. I picked up inspiration from other food and vignette photographers, I gazed and gazed at photos that caught my eye, I studied light and composition on those images, I read blogs for their photographic and writing qualities, and I have to say... there has been so much improvement from my first photos with my (not so) new camera (now) with the settings over on automatic to these images of the marble cake my husband excells at. I have learned to find my voice when photographing, and creating moods and textures on my pictures, and even though this blog is not high on statistics, I am so proud of all I've achieved on a personal basis here, I am so proud of my evolution and of my photography, I am so proud of the contents I have been displaying here for the last year. All I wish for the year ahead, blogging wise, is to keep growing, and learning, and evolving, becoming better at it, and I do hope ya'll keep up with me on this journey of sorts. And I hope you return this friday for the marble cake recipe, of course!