This was a golden Instagram week of baking, coffee and wintry walks, with a few signs of spring poking round the corner.
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On the 1st January I started posting daily photos to Instagram. I’m @mirrormirroxx. Come and be my friend.
It’s been an Instagram week of blue skies, sunshine and hearts, with a bit of bread baking and crochet thrown in.
It’s also been a weekend of attending Blogshop here in Seattle. My brain is fried, by backside is numb and my Photoshop skillz are still frighteningly amateur as you can see. But at least they exist, which they didn’t before the weekend. I’ll tell you more about it during the week. (Above images are all Instagrams as usual, but silly old Photoshop doesn’t have a Polaroid frames tool such as I have on my usual blogging software).
Happy Monday!
It’s been an Instagram week of sunshine and baking, turquoise, spring green and yellow. Come and find me. I’m ‘mirrormirrorxx’.
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Over the last few months a lot of people have asked me whether I was on Instagram or not.
I wasn’t because I couldn’t really see the point – I was already taking plenty of iPhone photos and sharing them on Twitter and Facebook and I didn’t really need to be on another social media time-sucking platform, did I?
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How wrong I was. As I mentioned before, one of this year’s resolutions was to try out Instagram, mostly because I thought it would be an easy way to do a ‘365 project’ and post a photo a day. On January 1st I posted one solitary photo from our New Year’s Day walk in Gasworks Park and thenceforth I have become gently obsessed. Instagram is like Twitter for photos. Follow some great photographers and you’ll have a constant stream of scrumptious eyecandy delivered direct to your phone. Take a photo with your phone (iPhones only at the moment unfortunately), or a upload a picture you took earlier, apply a suitably retro filter and then have it delivered to the Instagram network and also to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flick.
It’s been a great way to reconnect with blogger friends away from the noise of Twitter and Facebook and of finding new creative and imaginative people online as they go about their beautiful business.
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And it’s easy to produce lovely images. The camera on the new iPhone 4s is crazy good and the various photography apps and filters available (I’m using Camera+ and Picfx as well as the Instagram filters) make it fun to create all sorts of effects.
I’m enjoying the challenge of working within the iPhone’s limitations – wide-angle lens, tiny aperture, rubbish in low light, square format, not many pixels – and love the fact that the phone is usually to hand, when you see pretty lightshades at the opticians or a pile of soggy, but colourful leaves on a rainy trip to the dentist. It’s not a substitute for a fancy camera, but a very fabulous adjunct.
Already my Instagram feed is proving to be a cool visual journal of January 2012, and seeing all the photos grouped together has shown me that I do in fact have photographic style – colourful and graphic yet dreamy – which has never leapt out at me before.
Rest assured you’ll be seeing more Instagram photos on the blog in the days and weeks ahead (I’ll format them as Polaroids here so you can spot them).
And of course the whole network is riddled with cute pictures of cats.
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Are you on Instagram? What do you like about it? Which apps do you use? What’s your username so I can follow you? I am mirrormirrorxx.
This December I’ve decided to try my hand at putting together a ‘Picture the Holidays’ photo prompt book put together by Tracey Clark of Shutter Sisters via Paper Coterie.
Every day I am emailed a photo prompt to inspire me to take a photo, which I then upload into a photobook on the Paper Coterie site, which I can then have printed if I wish. I know I’m crap at following through on these sorts of projects, but a month of photos seems just about manageable.
Yesterday’s prompt was entitled ‘Holding On To Gratitude’, encouraging us to think about what we’re grateful for. Funnily enough the night before I had gone to sleep thinking particularly grateful thoughts as I’d been reading a thread on Ravelry where people had been asking for good wishes and prayers because they were going through some particularly horrible things in their lives. I know I am insanely lucky in so many ways.
Unfortunately, the things I am most truly grateful for – my health; my bright, beautiful, healthy daughter; my lovely husband and his lovely job; my wonderful friends; even my fabulous blog friends, were either too abstract, or too absent at school or work to be photographed yesterday.
Instead I hit up on something rather random. When you’re doing the Dukan diet you do become incredibly grateful for that morning cup of joe, which is permitted – oh joy! – if made with non-fat milk. This photo for me sums up the warmth and comfort of home; reminds me how lucky I am to be able to afford a fancy coffee machine to make fancy coffee in a fancy mug; makes me think of my husband, and of Seattle, where I’m so lucky to be able to live. And in a literal interpretation of ‘hold on’ I like that this pictures is full of handles. Oh well, it made sense to me.
What would you photograph given that prompt?
In a spectacular photography fail yesterday, I took my camera out last night to see the Christmas Ships without its SD card. So you’ll just have to image the fabulous pictures I would have taken of my daughter’s shining face as she gazed at the lit-up boats, next to blazing bonfires, against the sparkling backdrop of downtown and the Space Needle. They might have been a little more appropriate for the above challenge too. Grrrrrr.
Oh and Dine & Dish is doing this too, go to her blog for a different perspective on things.
I’m still trying to work on my food photography – don’t know why, love doing it. I’m going to set myself a weekly challenge to photograph a ‘difficult’ food subject.
This week’s was Chocolate Banana Bread, which is basically a big brown blob. I wanted to show the fudgey moistness and gooiness of the cake whilst introducing a bit of colour and getting everything properly exposed.
The colour bit was difficult – I had no fresh bananas left in the house, none of the other fresh ingredients are particularly colourful and flowers seemed a bit random.
In the end I settled for using my embroidered Mexican tablecloth, though I’m still wishing I had a brightly coloured cake stand or a knife with a brightly coloured handle. (More prop shopping obviously required.)
Anyway, did my photo succeed? Does it make you want to eat the banana bread? What would you have done differently? Critique away, I want to LEARN.
The recipe I used is here.
Ha! You thought you’d got away with no more Greek holiday snaps. Unfortunately it remains my intention to bore you all into submission. After all, what else is a blog good for?
I mentioned that we liked to stay in little unassuming hotels while in Greece, but we decided to break that rule for the first few days by booking into the Melenos Lindos, high in the acropolis of the ancient town of Lindos in Rhodes. This hotel gets so many fabulous mentions, that it seemed churlish not to try it out.
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Images from hotel website
Unfortunately they contacted us a few days before we left and said that there had been a double booking and they had no space for us. They pulled out all the stops to secure alternative accommodation (which, thanks to its enormous swimming pool and spacious grounds was actually much more suitable for the Minx) and offered us a free dinner on their beautiful outdoor dining terrace.
Architect Anastasia Papaioanou and Australian artist-designer Donald Green worked together to recreate a traditional multi-levelled, multi-terraced Lindian mansion, decorated in a timeless way using traditional local crafts and antiques.
Here are some of my photos from our dinner, supplemented by the couple above from the hotel’s website, as I didn’t have my wide-angled lens with me.
Enjoy the spectacularly pretty.
When planning our Royal Wedding-watching midnight feast, I decided to try my hand at the Chocolate Biscuit Cake which Prince William had requested be served at the wedding. I vaguely remembered having ‘Chocolate Fridge Cake’ myself as a child and thought that the Minx might like it.
I can now see where Prince William is coming from. This ‘cake’ is obscenely decadent and utterly scrumptious and also very quick and easy to make (though I imagine that the enormous version served at the wedding itself took a bit more time).
I based my version loosely on the recipe given by the Tea & Sympathy tearoom in New York and several British versions. The great thing about this cake is that, since it’s a ‘no bake’ cake – it just sets hard in the fridge – you can be very approximate with quantities and it will still turn out successfully.
The trickiest part for peeps not in the UK will be sourcing the correct biscuits (yes, biscuits in this case means ‘cookies’ and not the soft billowy scone-like things you eat for breakfast). The traditional English biscuit of choice would be McVities Digestives or Rich Teas – hard, plain, crumbly biscuits which are not too sweet and and a tad salty. They provide a nice contrast to the rest of the cake which is so sweet and rich. I can find McVities biscuits in the British food section at Metropolitan Market in Seattle and all the online British food stores also carry them, so they are available in the US if you look. The nearest American equivalent is the Graham cracker but they’re not quite the same. You could also experiment with some of the plain French cookies which are quite easily available (LU do good ones) or use a plain packet shortbread. Remember, nothing too rich, too sweet, or too fancy.
Golden syrup may also be a challenge for people outside the US. I discuss it at length here. Honey, maple syrup or corn syrup could be substituted at a pinch though your cake will taste different. Or else replace the cream and golden syrup with 14 fl oz (400 ml) of sweetened condensed milk.
Finally dried sour cherries are an inspired addition by moi, if I say so myself. The sour, chewy sweetness adds a whole new dimension to the soft cream unctuousness of the chocolate and the crunchiness of the biscuits. I would imagine that dried cranberries would have a similar effect, and raisins would do at a pinch.
Ingredients
Cake
1 sleeve (about 8-10 oz) McVities Rich Tea or Digestive biscuits, Graham crackers, or similar. I used Digestives.
10oz (300g) good chocolate. I used Green & Blacks, two bars of dark and two bars of milk since I had the Minx in mind. More sophisticated chocolate lovers may prefer to use all dark chocolate.
1/2 cup/200g/4oz butter
10 fl oz/300 ml heavy/double cream
4 fl oz / 100 ml/ 4 tbsp golden syrup (see above)
A couple of large handfuls of dried sour cherries/cranberries/raisins (optional)
Topping
4 oz (100g) good chocolate (see above)
1 tbsp heavy/double cream
Method
Line a loaf tin with butter and parchment paper
Crumble the cookies into small roughly almond-sized bits.
Set up a bain marie or a bowl over a pan of barely simmering water, break up the chocolate into bits and melt it in the bowl, together with the butter, cream and syrup.
When everything is fully melted together, stir in the crumbled biscuits and dried fruit if using until everything is fully coated with chocolate. Pour it into the loaf tin and smooth the top with a wooden spoon. Chill in the fridge for around 4 hours.
When the cake is fully chilled, melt the remaining chocolate and 1tbsp of cream or milk together to make a ganache. Turn out the cake and spread the ganache over the top and sides, filling in an gaps, lumps an bumps.
Serve in small pieces. A little truly does go a long way, though the Minx (who ADORED this cake) might not fully agree.
Here’s a picture of the cake served at the Royal Wedding at Prince William’s request and made by McVities. They apparently used 35lbs of chocolate and approximately 1,700 Rich Tea biscuits.
Last week I did my first ever paid photography assignment. Soojin, the graphic designer behind Etsy shop Soraam saw my photos with Uncle Beefy’s cupcakes and asked me to do a little product shoot with her.
Here are some of the results. Her pre-washed linen placemats and cushion covers – hand-printed with her own beautiful designs – really are stunning. I particularly love the placemats, which are designed to look equally good with or without plates.
The cupcakes are again courtesy of Uncle Beefy, as I’d fortuitously frozen some of the previous batch (cupcakes freeze really well by the way).
‘Soraam’ means ‘take a look with a smile on your face’ in Korean. You really can’t help yourself can you?
Over the last week or two, I’ve been dealing with a severe case of ‘I’ve got so much to do in every direction that I must go and hide and gibber quietly to myself in a darkened room’ which I’m finding is not the optimum solution to my ever-lengthening to do list.
So it’s mostly going to be pretty pictures until I emerge from under the layers of work, admin and clutter which are currently overwhelming me.
On Saturday I took some time off from the insanity, to do yet another photography class to keep me going on my 101 Things list. (By the way, I have apparently inspired Lara at Food. Soil. Thread and Helen at CountrysideWeddings to similar madness, so please go and encourage them too).
Clare Barboza, whose Child Photography class I recently took, is also a mega-talented food photographer and works out of the same awesome studio as Lara Ferroni.
The class was extremely useful. We talked about lighting and basic technique; critiqued photos Clare had taken; took shots of beautifully prepared and plated food cooked by Chef Becky Selengut and Marc Schermerhorn; tried plating and styling our own shots, critiqued our shots as a group and then got some tips on post production.
Here are some of the shots I took. My hit ratio of good shots to crap is still frustratingly low (and these had to be significantly worked on in Lightroom) but I feel like I’m starting to grope my way towards a style. The lighting and the studio props make everything so easy though.
I know I always say this (hey, what can I say, Seattle is STUFFED with prodigiously talented photogaphers) but again I can’t recommend this class highly enough if you’re into food photography. I believe Clare has got another couple of classes coming up, check on her blog if you’re interested.
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