Her house is cuter than mine. No fair.

, a photo by coffeeanddietcoke on Flickr.

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Cheerio’s

, a photo by coffeeanddietcoke on Flickr.

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Why This Isn’t a Food Blog

I had been mulling over the idea of starting a food blog for a few months before I started Coffee and Diet Coke.  I’m a huge fan of food blogs.  Reading them is one of those things that I do to entertain myself when my kid is watching Yo Gabba Gabba or Dora.  Cookbooks have always been an obsession of mine and of course I love to cook and eat, so I thought that a food blog would be fun.  And maybe I would be one of those cinderella stories where the blogger ends up getting their own cooking show on Food Network.  Those food bloggers just make it look so easy.  And how do they not all weigh 500 pounds?  Someone, tell me!  Well, after consideration I have determined that a food blog might not be the best idea for me.   I’ll give you one very big reason.

I HATE Photography!  Abhor it.  It makes me flinch a little when one of my momma pals pulls out her super expensive cameras that she barely knows how to operate.  But this wasn’t always the case.

Once upon a time, I actually liked taking pictures.  The old-fashioned way, with film and dark rooms.  And I was good at it (teacher said so, in whiny kid voice).   In fact, I was only a class or two short of a minor in it back in art school.  My first job post college was as a graphic artist for a retail chain.   I loved it the first few years until my boss decided that he wanted me to start taking the product photos for our ads.  He went to the big box store and bought an expensive camera for me to use.  At this point, I had been out of school for about 3 years and I had forgotten everything about aperture and shutter speed.   My first few photography sessions were nightmares.  I remember almost having a total meltdown with tears and everything in the little studio we had set up in our office.   This time period also coincided with a very stressful time in my family life, so I’m not 100% sure what stress was which, but needless to say, that was the start of my photography hate.

Eventually, I saw that I was going to have to refresh my memory on the basics.  One Saturday I went to Barnes & Noble and read photography books for about 3 hours.   It worked.  I remembered little bits here and there.   A lot of it was trial and error, but eventually I was able to take a decent picture.  It was never good enough for my boss.  He always wanted better.  He would bring in ads from magazines and say “Look at this photo. This is what I want.”  That made me want to scream.  I tried to tell him that it’s kind of hard to get a good shot in a room with no windows but it was never good enough.   It got to the point where I just did the best I could do and he kind of resigned himself to the fact that we weren’t going to have Marth Stewart Living photography.  After seven years on the job, I quit to have my baby and stay home with her.  Honestly, I think the photography thing was a huge reason that I didn’t hesitate to quit.  The stress of never living up to his expectations burned me out.

These days, I use a point and shoot camera or my iPhone to take pix of my kid.   I have fooled around with the settings on the camera a little to manually adjust it, but I have never had the “Let me turn into a part-time photographer” bug that a lot of  the other moms I know seem to have.   I’m scarred.  It’s like a movie.  Or a tragic novel.

“I’ll never take pictures again!” she screamed and then ran out of the dark room, tears flowing down her face and onto her camera lens.  

I need that grizzled old photography teacher to come along and help me rediscover my passion for it.  Anyway, the photography thing really threw me out of the food blog arena.  Sure, there are other reasons.  Time, money, the MESS.

Now, that’s not to say that I won’t ever post a recipe along with a pathetic picture.  I plan on it, for sure.  But now you know why my blog isn’t called  Coffee and Cupcakes or Coffee and Cookies.

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