Picture Perfect Cooking

Up until the last few weeks, all of the photos on this blog were shot with a super-zoom compact Sony H7.  C and I have had this camera for about four years or so and were really pleased with it.  It was simple to use, but it also had a lot of different options if you didn’t want to shoot on automatic. 

C & I are both photography fans and he has been wanting to buy us an digital SLR for a year or two, but I was too cheap to do it.  Well, I finally gave in and we bought one as our joint Christmas present because C told me he was going to buy it for me if we didn’t buy it together. He can be stubborn like that! 🙂 So during Thanksgiving weekend, we ordered a Canon EOS Rebel T3i with a 18-135mm lens from Amazon while it was very much on sale.

Wow is all I can say! WOW!  This is one awesome and complicated camera!  My mom and dad had a film SLR when I was growing up and I remember trying my hand at photography back then.  I would try to shoot “artistic” shots of flowers and my Cabbage Patch dolls.  Then I would use my allowance to have them developed.  Isn’t that funny?  Several times there was a finger or even a toe or two if I was shooting down in the pictures, but I was hooked.

This is not something you take out of the box, turn on, and then start shooting beautiful, gorgeous shots.  Nope, there is definitely a learning curve involved in this.  Thankfully, another Christmas present I received will hopefully help with that.  I had been wanting to improve my food photography for a while even before we decided to upgrade our camera so I asked my in-laws for the book “Plate to Pixel” by Helene Dujardin.  I have just started it, but in the few pages that I have read there is a lot of information.  Ms. Dujardin’s shots are so pretty and I hope to be able to duplicate some of the beauty with practice.  She has done seminars at The Pioneer Woman’s ranch and I wish she would do one around Kentucky because I would love to have more instruction.

So bear with me, folks.  The photos on here might get worse before they get better, but I am trying my best to learn the ins and outs of our new favorite toy!