Sucking less at food photos. Kinda.

Hola peebles. Hope your Thursday is slightly less dreary than mine. It’s kind of a sickly grey (gray?) outside today, and to be honest, it’s a little grey inside, too. Inside my heart. Because Parenthood is over for the season. And true to the rumors I read on the interwebs, the season finale was so neat and clean, I fear it may not be coming back. For those of you thinking, “this is so yesterday’s news,” I know, and I’m sorry. But I’m not sorry that my cable bill went from upwards of $100/month to like $18 between Netflix and Hulu. That’s mo’ dollaz for shopping, saving, and most importantly, stuffing my face.

So a couple of weeks ago, I posted this recipe for Black Bean Soup with Kale & Farro, a simple, wintry and (if you recall) bacon-free soup that somehow still manages to rock my world thanks to the decadent and aromatic addition of smoked olive oil. Lucky little pig that I am, the recipe caught the eye of Brenda over at The Smoked Olive, itself, and she asked if she could post the recipe to their site. My reaction went a little something like this:

First off, I die.
Second, yes, you can most certainly post the recipe to your site, where it will join the likes of none other than Tyler Florence and John Ash. I die again.
Third, crap and double crap, my pictures look like crap.

Unfortunately, about 1/243 pictures that I take for The Pig & Quill ever sees the light of day. Literally. Our kitchen, if you haven’t noticed, is a charming yet dark galley make darker by the fact that I insist on taking pictures of the food we eat as we eat it, which means it’s happening sometime between the hours of 7-9pm. No bueno. So, in attempt to both provide a somewhat acceptable photo to Brenda — and to begin tackling my “take less crappy” photos resolution from weeks past, I took a little stab at improving an old iPhone pic to make it passable as decent.

{Black Bean Soup with Kale & Farro Photoshop Edit}

Kale Soup Photoshop Side-by-SideCamera: iPhone 4 (I know!); Edits: levels adjusted; contrast adjusted with unsharp mask; sharpness adjusted; added white vignette.

I think the finished result isn’t actually that bad, if a little overexposed. Yes, it still looks artificially lit, but do those veggies look pumped up or what? Had I taken a wider shot to begin with (i.e. used the real camera), I would have been able to crop in a little more interestingly. I may, in fact, still do that. We’ll see how motivated I’m feeling.

Kale Soup Cropped & Titled

Oh look, I felt motivated.

To give love where love is due, I pulled a few super easy and step-by-step tips from zoomyummy when piecing this guy together. Petra’s tutorials on zoomyummy are pretty stellar for a number of reasons, most key being that she 1) caters to even the most novice photo-editors and 2) uses Photoshop Elements, so if you’re not using your employer-owned Adobe programs for personal editing (I have no idea what you’re talking about), you can actually afford to do most of these edits with the $99.00 Elements program. Sweet.

To date, I’ve kind of been slamming photos onto the blog like this guy slams Jaeger Bombs, and it shows. And in a world almost purely powered by Pinterest, Tastespotting and painfully beautiful food blogs, it’s just not gonna fly.

So, *twirls hair*…whadda ya think?

Super Cinchy Crunchy Oven-Fried Ravioli
Shredded Brussie Salad with Lemon Meyer Vinaigrette (and a Full Circle guest post)

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