Guest Post for Emmy

This was my guest post written for EmmyMom.

One of my favorite magazines I get in the mail is Food Network.  What can I say, I love to cook.  So the night that the May 2013 magazine showed up at my door, I dove right into it to see what new and interesting things I could find.  Flipping through every page, reading it’s contents, I made it to page 32 and this is what I saw… (dun dun dun)

shared on instagram that night (Boomerbear)

Wow, this hit a spot with me.  Now… I am absolutely no pro (although I’d love to be) but one of my favorite things to do is to photograph my food at restaurants number 1 and secondly a lot of times I will write a review on my thoughts about that particular restaurant if I haven’t written one previously.

Honestly, that’s great publicity for your restaurant in my opinion.  Free advertising, because you’re not paying me anything (yet, call me… lol).  The first review I wrote was last June for a Cajun style restaurant in my area.  I wrote the review, posted it on their facebook site and they loved it.  In fact, the next time I went in and from there on out the owner has remembered me.

So, I pondered what I read in the magazine for a while and then kind of let it be.  Since then, I’ve still photographed my food, still written my reviews, but been a little leery at the same time.  Now I live in, as I always joke, podunk Missouri, so obviously not NYC or LA, but I still wonder if at some point someone is going to get on to me.  I absolutely hate getting in trouble.

So jump forward a few weeks and I caught an edition of The Chew one day and they were talking about food bloggers and blogging in general.  At the top of the hour they always address current topics and they just so hit on this very topic.  I’ve included the video.

I absolutely LOVE what Mario Batali says!!  I can tell you when I take my photos, that I don’t use my flash.  Flash generally tends to make your food not look that appealing…  This isn’t the best example, but you will notice that the flash is on because I forgot the camera I was using automatically puts it on unless you turn it off (a point and shoot).  I had just received this camera for Christmas so I was learning the tips and tricks of using it.

I just makes the food look a little funny and makes some of your background lose its detail.  Like I said, this isn’t a great example, however I’m at a loss to find an example because very seldom do I use the flash on my food and seldom do I use this camera for the photos either.

Now one night, I really think I should have used the flash, over the restaurant lighting because my photos turned out funny looking in my opinion, but at the same time, I try to be courteous to other patrons and not set my flash off.

But, with restaurant lighting, sometimes you have to take what you can get.  Sometimes it’s a win situation and sometimes it’s a lose situation.

So with all of this, I’ve decided to go ahead and keep on posting my restaurant reviews.  I guess if a restaurant tells me that I need to delete those photos, that’s when I will be respectful of their wishes and delete the photos, but until that time happens, I’m ready to keep on snapping away.

What are your thoughts on all of this?