I am 15 days into the 28 days of capturing 55 recipes for losebabyweight.com.au. You can read about what it is I am doing here and progress posts here and here. My kitchen has been in a current state of chaos lately as you can see by the picture below.

I am slowly plugging away at it everyday and I can feel my confidence rising a little bit more with each recipe cooked, plate styled and click of each photo. I am on target to finish in the allotted time due to some seriously crazy busy days at the start, which I managed to cook, style and photograph between 3-5 recipes a day in the first 7-10 days. It left me feeling pretty exhausted and I ended up with a cold late last week from running myself into the ground! Ah the things you do!

My skills as a stylist and photographer have been pushed a little bit further with each photograph. Trying to create a new "look" for each photograph to complement the dish that I have prepared is a feat in itself with limited props, backgrounds and crockery. Jane the owner of Tea Cups and Twigs (the cutest shop ever - you must visit if you are ever in Toowoomba) kindly lent me numerous baskets of crockery, cutlery, place mats and tablecloths from her shop and from her personal collection. The injection of new materials has done wonders for the creativity levels.

I also got out of the room I created as my studio and moved to some other areas of the house to work with some different light to change things up a bit. It is what I needed as I got stuck in a bit of a rut by the end of last week and felt like I needed to play around a bit more with my styling, food placement and lighting. I had originally been using side lighting for most of my previous photographs but I tried a different approach with these few photos here using backlighting. I have been reading From Snapshots to Great Shots by Nicole S Young, which has given me some other ideas about using lighting and food photography.

This week I have done a series of wraps. The fiddliest thing you will ever photograph I think. Getting the filling just so and making everything stay together and not spew out the ends is almost impossible. I would have to say there are my most unfavourite thing to try and style and photograph. I should know because I think I had to do 5 lots. I have another week and a half left to finish of the remaining recipes on my list to do. I hope to have a little bit of a break before embarking on another project with Lose Baby Weight. So you will have to be patient with me once again with the lack of normal content on my blog!

In the mean time now that the weather is starting to chill down nicely why not re-visit this Beef and Barley Soup I made last year. It will certainly warm up your tummy.