Book Review: Food Photography: From snapshots to great shots
12:34 PM
Every step, every gesture leads us in a direction. Sometimes planned, sometimes unplanned. Sometimes we know we are heading, while on rest of the occasions we have yet to discover the outcome.
When I started this blog, it was more of an outcome of an abundance of time. A junction in life when I was the word photography was as alien in my life as flying. Yes I could fly, when the pilot was in the cockpit and similarly I could take pictures, when the camera was in the auto mode. Nothing more, nothing less. But then when I started posting my pics and at the same time the beautiful clicks of others, I was truly ashamed. I knew with a DSLR in hand, I could surely do better than that. (Yes all my pics are from DSLR - however good or bad and that proves, that having a good camera can never make you take good pictures).
So, slowly I started to learn. To read the camera manual, websites and tutorials. And tried to practice. Thankfully the result started showing a difference. In my quest to learn, you could very well imagine my happiness, when I got a great resource to learn and practice my food photography. Yes, I'm referring to the amazing book "Food Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots" by Nicole S. Young that I got for a review few months back. And though I could have written this review so much before, yet I wanted to read it from cover to cover before I shared it with you all. So if you too want your pictures to look tantalizing and drool worthy, read further about this book.
Alas my love for cakes is no more a secret. And like so many of you I hold a deep fascination for them. How simple ingredients like flour, butter, sugar and eggs transforms to form myriad of forms, flavours and textures. Somehow this joy of the amazing creations that one can master, is much more intriguing to me than just taking a bite (Of course I dig deeper than just a bite....but that's separate). So you can very well imagine my joy when I got a copy of A world of cakes by Krystina Castella for review. So here's my point of view, as published in Honest Cooking.
The moment after we decided on our visit to India for diwali, I was on amazon and flipkart, looking for the cookbooks I wanted to buy. Being more used to browsing though the physical books in the book store at a lavish pace. Till I got the “looks can kill” stares, I would flip through them all. But here this virtual shopping was not going so easy without the ease of actually knowing the book from cover to cover. This is where the mighty word “review” came in the picture. So I thought to at least put my experience of cookbooks I own in perspective, which might help others.
The novice baker that I'm, I was very excited to buy my first ''baking” book. And after a usual hard time in making a choice amidst the selected few baking books available over here - Bahrain (even Dorie Greenspan's book was not available here), I settled for this one.
So here's my opinion and experience of this baking bible, in hope that it helps someone else in making a choice.
