I first took an interest in photography as a youngster when my Dad got interested in portrait photography. He bought me a Zorki camera which I loved but I only understood the basics, and I do remember my Dad had his own darkroom and teaching me how to develop film.
Along came football and girls,( well one in particular!,) and we have just celebrated our 42nd wedding anniversary together so that was the end of photography for me. For the time being at least!.
Fast forward some 45 years to about 2010 when I became hooked on cooking, to the point I was considering a change of career and becoming a chef. We used to entertain most weekends and I loved the process of deciding on a menu, buying the ingredients and making the dishes ( which would take all day, sometimes more than 1 day!) and mainly the results were well worth the effort. So infatuated with cooking was I that I decided to start a food blog but was singularly unimpressed with the quality of my food photographs that I gave up on the blog but still carried on cooking.
so what a godsend Covid 19 wasfor me, I had 3 months off work, subsidised by Rishi’s generous furlough payments and I enrolled on a photography course and bought a Sony alpha 58 crop sensor camera which I loved but hadn’t got a clue how to use it.
In fact, after I read the first lesson I asked for a full refund, I didn’t know the exposure triangle from the Bermuda triangle!!!
Yep, you guessed it, as I progressed through the course, the more I began to appreciate the expert knowledge a professional photographer has, and needs to have, in order to create first class images. It is a hell of a lot more than point and shoot. I used to, and still do think of how to improve my photographs every day and some things work, some things don’t.
Sadly the people we used to entertain for dinner parties are no longer with us for one reason or another and, with my wife developing sepsis and subsequently having to become meat free, my passion for cooking waned rather quickly so food photography and cooking went on the back burner (pun intended!) but my passion for photography still wouldn’t leave me.
Forward two years and my wife is recovered, she has been told she must never eat red meat again and I have rekindled my love for cooking, and by golly you can create just as tasty vegetarian dishes as you can meat based dishes, and that is coming from me, a devout carnivore!!, you do not need meat to live a perfectly healthy life and strangely my appreciation of food photography has been rekindled, but it is still not good enough!
O.K, I have only been qualified as a photographer for 3 years, love every minute of it and wish I could do it full time, but I can’t as it is so hard to earn a living from it. However, I can devote time to develop my website and intend to post something at least once a week.
Well, that didn’t work! A run of health issues put paid to that so here we are a year later in exactly the same position.
Lets try again!!
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