Letting Go, the Photography Portfolio and a Thank You

I haven't been around because I've been pondering actually going forward with this blog or shuttering it entirely, as I mentioned in this post. The conclusion, which seems like the most logical thing the more I think about it, is to continue but more in the form of a photoblog so that written posts will not necessarily be a rule of thumb, and to expand to other topics of interest to me, but first things first. I will no longer include recipes when I do write posts to accompany photographs of food, unless I can't find a similar recipe anywhere else on the web; I apologize if this is distressing to you but I'm sure your relationship with Google search will benefit from this arrangement. I'm arranging for the look of the blog to be overhauled to accommodate all these changes.
Thank you for joining me in any capacity over the last three years and I hope you continue to accompany me on forthcoming adventures.


As many of you already know, I've finally, after thinking I probably should and then getting a sudden impulse to finally do it, uploaded some of my best pictures to a photography portfolio. I'm without my film cameras or boxes upon boxes of negatives, good and bad, which are all sitting in storage half the world away, but there was enough digital work available and a few ancient scans of some film pictures to cobble something together. So after weeks of organizing, sorting, choosing, collaging, trashing, re-collaging, organizing into categories, queueing in the proper order, requeueing again and again, etc... here it is: My Photography Portfolio.
You can also find it in my sidebar in case you don't want to click on the link above now and want to peruse it later.


And finally, thank you to Olive Magazine which is one of the BBC's food magazines here in the UK for mentioning Saffron & Blueberry in its August issue in the "Websites and blogs that inspire us" section. I'm honored and thrilled to be included alongside two star bloggers, Matt Armendariz of Matt Bites and Y of Lemonpi who has been mentioned here before as being a partner in [sweet] crime.

On Not Styling and Photography

I said in my last post that I would write a manifesto about how I don't style food, so here it is, and I thought it might be helpful to someone out there since I get emails about my setups (or as you'll see, lack thereof):
I don't style food: I don't know how to do it, and to be honest it's not something for which I feel I have either a knack or an inclination/interest. Yes I love beautiful ceramics and nice fabrics, but no I don't want to collect them for the sole purpose of styling food to take pictures of it. You'll read why just below.
What interests me is photography. Taking photographs of food is necessary for a food blog and while I was incredibly lazy about it before my little girl was born, for whatever reason, her coming into the world motivated me to actually put some effort into the act of taking pictures for the blog. Don't ask, I don't know why this was the catalyst.

I've mentioned here and there before that we don't live in our own house so to speak, and by that I don't mean that it's not our house because we rent it, I mean that it's not our house because we've been made to live in it for reasons that are too complicated to describe here; think of it as a corporate house with corporate furniture that we are neither allowed to discard nor even move out. This means that I don't have a separate table nor the room for a separate table, however small, to set up by the windows with the best light here. On top of that, we've been living in and out of boxes for more than a year as our moving plans keep changing. This significantly affects my desire to collect props for food pictures, as in I'd rather not collect things for which I mostly have little practical purpose other than to style food, especially when I might have to pack a lot more breakable things to transport somewhere else that way (and with the baby who takes great delight in opening up boxes and taking as many things out of them as possible before I can stop her).
Moreover, I believe in the food being the thing of greatest interest in the shot so I tend to photograph the food as I see it when I'm going to eat it or sometimes completely abstractly if that is the way it strikes me, e.g. pictures of matcha macarons.

So, an average setup in my world -actually this is quite a neat and simple setup, nothing like some other setups I've done which were totally guerilla compared to this- means something like this:

What you're looking at is a notepad upside down on a serving tray flipped upside down onto a moving box which is shoved up against the TV table, with the background being whatever I could find at the time so the lid of a gift box for the baby's birthday. The usual back of a white baby floor mat that I use as a reflector being unfindable at that moment in time, I grabbed the first thing I could find to reflect some light, that being the bottom of a box that had been mailed to me which, in spite of the airmail tape on it, reflected enough light to be of use to me. Why the quick and dirty setup you ask? Because I take pictures when my baby naps which is not often and not for long and I want to be done with it as fast as possible, so I set up the most basic thing that will get me the result I'm after. With this setup I'm on my knees on the floor taking pictures. I have a good tripod which I mostly don't use for lack of room and setup time.

Obviously it's not an ideal setup but it gets me where I want to go. On the left the picture just out of camera and on the right, the picture after adding a touch of contrast (+.05) and adjusting the exposure (+.20) a little bit.

Why am I showing you this? Because I think it's a shame that people think you need anything fancy to get a decent picture and because you don't have to have a lot of props (or any props in my case) to get a decent picture; If I can do it by cobbling a few things together that have no apparent relation to photography, there's no reason for anyone out there to get a bunch of equipment to do it. On the contrary, having very few things forces you to have to think as creatively as possible.

One thing I haven't shown is that I make sure that no direct light fell on the chocolate. It was actually a slightly cloudy day here and my diffusion paper having been packed away a long time ago in the far reaches of the boxes in the back of the garage, I just left the Roman blind down and let that filter the occasional bursts of sunlight coming in. It's thicker than what you'd probably want to filter your light but shows that you can use anything, even a white bed sheet for example. On overcast days I simply pull the blind up and use the light as is, for example in the pictures in the brioche post.

Basic info on this shot is my Nikon D200 with the 17-55mm/f2.8 lens, the Aperture set at f8, shutter speed of 1/40 with an ISO setting of 250.
Anyway, that's my story and I'm stickin' to it.
I've got something exciting to share with you all in an upcoming post. Not sure if it's going to be the next one but working relentlessly to make it as soon as possible, so stay tuned.

To Blog: Why? What? and Pumpkin Coconut Sour Cherry Bread

So here I am again a few days later than I thought I would post this because I've been thinking about many things relative to this blog, the most salient being: why blog? Or more precisely, why blog about food in my case.

There are many posts out there about why blog. Some of them make a lot more sense to me than others but they're all valid to their own authors, and in the end I have to find the reason for myself. A while back I had whole new plans for this blog which all revolved around food, and of course as things are wont to do, things changed. Then I decided that I would post photographs and other things and write fewer recipes and that it would become a more general blog, and that got under way, but somehow I was driven back to more recipes and fewer other things than food, basically only food.
The thing is, dear readers, that I really love food, but I'm not sure I love blogging about it anymore.

When I started blogging about food almost three years ago, I'd been blogging for a year on another platform and was a bit frustrated with my blog because it was general and I felt the lack of focus meant that it was more of a journal than anything else, and between you and me, I've never been much of a journaler. At all. Then one day while doing a recipe search, for a cupcake recipe of all things, I discovered food blogs and started perusing them and loving them, because I love food, and after a while I thought to myself that the simplest way to create focus in my blogging would be to blog about food. Thus Saffron & Blueberry was born.

keep reading >>

Let them eat Coconut Sour Cherry Brioche

Seemingly, when the internet is "broken" so is my ability to think of anything to say in a blog post. For a long time I tried to think of what angle I would take on these brioches; I think I was also blocked from the effort of writing the post about my grandfather and feeling pressured to say something equally meaningful when writing subsequent posts. The truth is I don't know if I can ever replicate the depth of feeling in that post, and I probably shouldn't try since few things elicit such depth of feeling in me anyway. So instead of trying to emote all over the place, I'll tell you about brioche.

Why did I make brioche? That's like asking me why I have sudden cravings for things. Do you know why you (if you cook or bake) have sudden cravings to make things? It's only this week that it's truly starting to warm up here, though if you're not directly in the sun it's still quite chilly, and all the mucky weather we'd been having previously made me really want brioche. Brioche is comforting, of course how could it not be with all that butter. Here, you can't just pop down to the bakery around the corner and get a beautiful brioche with a little head poking out of its rotund body, so after much hemming and hawing, it became clear that to enjoy some I would have to make my own.

Actually, I'd been meaning to make brioche for a long time, I just was never motivated enough to actually do it. And then I got on this brioche kick and that's all I was making for about three weeks, not every day of course, but just trying out different recipes, and in particular testing to see if I could substitute coconut milk in various brioche recipes. Why? The truth is that I had a can of coconut milk, which I don't often use, and I didn't want to make pudding or curry; I just wanted to add a bit of coconut flavor to something in which you don't usually see coconut. So, mild obsession with brioche + can of coconut milk that needed to be used = some sort of coconut brioche.

keep reading >>

Connection Nightmare

In the 2 minutes that my internet works before it goes out again for the next 10 minutes, I just wanted to let you all know that I'm not dead, or taking a break, I just can't get on for more than a couple of minutes at a time and this makes it impossible to post right now. Thanks Virgin Broadband.
Please standby while we sort out our technical difficulties.