lilac shrieks and scarlet bellowings

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Food Photography Fail

At the start of this week, I had the brilliant idea to cook up a bunch of food and take pictures of it. I could practice my cooking, my aesthetic arrangement of food, and my photography all in one go, and at the end, I'd end up with something to put on the walls in my kitchen and/or dining room. Good idea, right?

Wrong.

So, I made the shopping trip, and bought everything I could conceivably need... except butter. Butter is important, so I tabled the project for another couple of days. I bought butter a day or two ago, and tonight I came home, made a simple dinner, and started setting up the dining room table.

Problem the first: I didn't look closely at the packaging on my new tablecloth. It's not a table cloth at all; it's a shiny vinyl “table pad.”

Problem the second: The table pad isn't shiny in the center of it, because the center of my light fixture lacks a light bulb.

Problem the third: The light socket in question is the width of a standard light bulb, but accommodates less than half the length of the threaded portion of a standard light bulb. I have a feeling that this is yet another fixture in my home that will earn me laughter from Home Depot and Lowe's employees when I try to explain to them my conundrum. (Seriously, it happened when I gave them the dimensions of my stove. How was I to know that it's 2 to 3 inches smaller than a standard stove, and the same number of inches larger than a compact one? Creative soldering fixed things in the end. [Thanks, Dad!])

Problem the fourth: I seem to have misplaced my flash. I'm more than a little freaked out about that, truth be told, since I can't recall seeing it since I was in San Francisco. In May. Of last year.

Problem the fifth: My homemade bread is a little too home-made-looking, if you get my drift.

So, the new plan for the evening: I skipped out on Bragg Jam with the intent of being productive. Productivity for the evening now means tearing every inch of my house apart and putting it back together (cleaner and neater) until I've found the flash, or determined it's somewhere far, far away. And then, maybe, some wine, some ugly bread, a book, and a bath.