Doing Hard Things February Update

A too-zoomed-in, oddly-angled, cluttered shot of Thai Beef Tacos from my first recipe review.

Well, guys, as it turns out, doing hard things is actually...uh...HARD. I spent a good portion of January feeling frustrated, discouraged and overwhelmed. But I also had a lot of good things happen. And the good news is that despite what it felt like, I'm making more progress than I think.

1. Learn to shoot in Manual mode.

I learned a few things this month. First, that I don't actually want to shoot in Manual mode most of the time. What I want is Aperture Priority mode. And I have been doing that, albeit with back-up non-flash automatic mode, which is the same thing I've been doing forever. The reason is that I don't want to have to remake recipes just because I didn't get the shots I needed. I feel a little guilty for using a crutch, but not so much that I'm going to stop doing it. Remaking recipes for the sake of photographs ranks among my top least favorite things when it comes to this blog.

I did find this set of tutorials: http://improvephotography.com/photography-basics and I've done the first lesson, but I need to prioritize sitting down at set times and working through it. I did schedule times twice a week, but I was bad about sticking to them.

2. Post more photos of recipe steps to either Flickr/Picasa or Facebook.

I actually did post recipe step photos to Facebook for the cannoli recipe I posted on Monday. I'm not sure how well Facebook works for that and I'll probably only do it for the complicated recipes, but it was nice to be able to stash those extra photos somewhere. And hopefully helpful to people who might want to actually, ya know, cook.

3. Make my recipes easily downloadable/printable.

Ha! I didn't do this. I didn't even think about doing this. I've got a whole year though, right?

4. Develop more of my own recipes.

If you've noticed that I didn't post quite as many times in January as normal, this is the reason. For the recipes I posted, several were entirely of my own invention and I made much more than minor alterations to the others, which required a lot more testing and trial-and-error than I have typically done in the past. As a result, my posting schedule suffered a little bit. I can only assume I'll get better at this.

I also did a bunch of other stuff in January. I had this post on Wonkomance, two other guest posts on other blogs that will go up sometime in February, a sekrit project that I'll talk more about when it comes out, and I worked with Megan Mulry on planning this social gathering for people coming to DC for the Popular Romance Project screening and conference on February 11th. I also did my first TBR Challenge post and visited all the participating blogs, which was so fun and I discovered several great new ones like Feminist Fairy Tale Reviews. Plus there was...life. This is still a hobby, after all.

Actually, I went into this post feeling like I haven't been very successful at any of the things I set out to do this year. But you know what? Sometimes I just have to give myself more credit. I had occasion to look back at some of my old posts this past week for a guest post that will go up later in the month and my photography has improved a ton even in just the nine months I've been writing this blog. So I didn't exactly stick to my plan of doing photography tutorials twice a week. I guess in addition to Doing Hard Things, I also need to be Letting Myself Off The Hook.

Does that sounds familiar to anyone else?

The Year of Doing Hard Things

I'm hereby dubbing 2015 "The Year of Doing Hard Things". I'm not trained as a chef or a photographer or a book reviewer or a graphic designer or a web developer. I spent most of my career in marketing. Marketing for small organizations is a funny sort of discipline. I ended up teaching myself the basics of a lot of different things because we often couldn't afford to hire a professional or because I couldn't make a case for better whatever without first illustrating why doing it ourselves wasn't good enough.

But as I've progressed as a blogger, all my self-taughtness has become increasingly frustrating. So, rather than continuing to coast along, learning what I need to learn as I need to learn it, I'm going to focus on a few specific skills/goals this year. Here's what I'm interested in learning, along with the first step for each goal, just to keep me honest. I'll post an update near the end of every month and provide mid-month updates on Twitter using hashtag #2015DHT.

1. Learn to shoot in Manual mode.

I have a really, really nice camera. And a really, really nice 50mm, 1.8f lens. But I still shoot in Automatic mode. Why? I don't understand anything about shutter speed or aperture or any of the photography terms I see bandied about on the web. So I'm going to take a class. First step: find an in-person or online class/set of tutorials that I connect with.

2. Post more photos of recipe steps to either Flickr/Picasa or Facebook.

I take approximately 30-50 photos per recipe post from different angles, with different lighting, with different compositions in order to get the 5-6 shots I use. About half of those are recipe steps, which are always ugly (I mean, I'm cooking and usually covered in flour so I rarely think about staging in that moment). I'd like to get better about those so I don't feel so awkward about sharing more of them and also get more useable shots of the finished product, which means less guessing about what might look good and more, well, knowing. I have no idea if there are classes for food photography, but someone has probably done online tutorials if I look. First step: find tutorials.

3. Make my recipes easily downloadable/printable.

It has come to my attention that some people actually use my recipes. Pretty nifty! But I can only imagine it must be somewhat frustrating because of how they're written. A lot of food blogs have nifty plug-ins that enable a standardized format and easily printable recipe pages. But they only work on Wordpress and I'm currently hosted on Blogger with my own domain name. Complicating this process is the fact that the theme I have installed was designed for Blogger only. First step: find out how to move my blog to self-hosting with Wordpress.

4. Develop more of my own recipes.

This is a challenge because I love to bake and baking is very precise. I also like to bake complicated things, like this Dobos Torte I made at Christmas (my effort/photo is above). In order to do that though, I have to plan for more failures since not everything I invent myself works. I'm not sure to what degree this is possible and it's not as well-defined a goal as the others. Like, how many recipes should be exclusively mine? What about books where the most obvious choice is something basic that I really can't invent myself? First step: schedule recipe reviews at least a month in advance.

P.S. I' m also doing Wendy the Super Librarian's 2015 TBR Challenge so you can expect to see those posts pop up once a month too. They may have recipes attached or they may not depending on whether something grabs me food-wise or they may not since the point of my doing this challenge is to read some of the things that I might not choose to review otherwise (as well as putting a dent in that TBR pile). My first book will be The Fabergé Cat by Anne Weale, a Harlequin Romance from 1994, if anyone wants to read along.


What this will add up to is two more posts per month, which will be in addition to my usual Monday and Thursday posts. Otherwise, nothing much will change, except hopefully, better photos, better, more useable recipes and less frustration for me. WHEEE!

So is there anything on this list you're good at? Anything you'd like to learn?