Practice Makes Perfect. And Research Makes Perfect-er

You want to know an embarrassing secret?  NO!  WRONG!  I DO shower every most days and I have NOT worn a fanny pack in my entire lifetime the last decade.  Geez people, give me a little credit! 


The real secret is that I have a professional-grade DSLR camera, complete with every switch and button and mode you could ever dream of AND a bad-ass VR zoom lens, and I kind of have not earthly idea how to use it.  In a past life, I was a retail buyer for DSLR cameras and knew a whole lot about marketing them and pricing them and bundling them in ads, but really no clue how to actually use them if I needed/wanted to.  So when I ended up with a Nikon D200 and the zoom lens to go with it, I'll admit it went in the closet for awhile.


Now that I have a bit more time to play with the thing, I've started using it again, hoping that the sheer awesomeness of the camera will make up for my lack of knowledge about how to use it.  I'd say that its worked okay (being generous here) so far, and that I've had some good photo successes, and some epic failures, depending on light and my level of motivation on a given food-blogging night.


I'd mentioned a couple of times to my mother-in-law, Mona, that I wanted to try to take better pictures.  She's the sweetest, and got me this book to help me along the way:

Its amazing!  It makes using a complicated camera so much easier and it feels really intuitive (even for a self-admitted ditz like myself).  The author has such wonderful ideas about how to stage food pics and what to look for in lighting, etc.  I can't wait to try all of the tips I got from this book!


In the meantime, I practiced some of the tips in the first few chapters, and I think it makes a real difference in my pictures.  It might be that I have been using natural light a lot more, which AUTOMATICALLY makes food pictures better, but I think there is more to it than that.  I might be that I'm actually learning how to use this Nikon bad-boy. Imagine that!


No recipes in this post...just some practice shots that I think came out pretty well.  They look pretty good, eh?