Love and Olive Oil

Happy 6th Birthday!

Pictures from the very beginning of L&OO

On February 16, 2007, I posted my very first recipe on this here blog. A seared tuna salad, in fact. The post contained a single image (shown above, top), and a measly 3 sentences of text (apparently I was much more concise back then). Despite the fact that it was a recipe for seared tuna salad, I did not include the seared tuna in the actual photo. As you can see by the unpublished image underneath, it wasn’t exactly appetizing.

Apparently that image was so horrifying that it took me 6 years before I finally attempted to photograph tuna again.

NicoiseSalad-SM

My my how far we’ve come.

I’ve said this before and I will say it again, as much as those old photos make me cringe, I will never delete them. I will never rephotograph those posts. They are my history, proof of just how much I’ve learned and how much I’ve grown as a cook and an artist in the past 6 years.

What do they say, you can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been?

Well, I know.

And where I’ve been is publicly on display for anyone brave enough to venture into the depths of my archives.

I’ve come from a horizontal land of lime-green dishes and florescent overhead lighting. From a place where juices ran wild and the goal was to get as close as humanly possible to my food.

I’ve since learned that you have to take a step back to truly see the bigger picture.

Such is food photography. Such is life.

With that I say, I wouldn’t trade these past 6 years for anything. Here’s to personal growth, to accepting who we were and anticipating who we are to become, to taking the good with the bad and learning from our mistakes. Here’s to eating those mistakes (because we are, after all, food bloggers). Here’s to building ourselves by building the community around us, not by taking others down. Here’s to cooking for the sake of cooking. Baking for the sake of indulging. And indulging for the sake of pure enjoyment, not profit.

And here’s to many more years to come.

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61 Comments

  1. CONGRATS on your six year anniversary!!

  2. I hope I will have come as far as you have in a few years time :) I think I’ve already made massive progress but there’s definitely more to come! Thanks for the inspiration! :)

  3. Happy 6th birthday! I just discovered your blog and was just going to comment on how delicious your food looks because of your gorgeous pictures. I just hit one year and I’ve been looking at tons of food photography resources and pictures to try to improve my pictures. My pictures (especially the early stuff) looks a lot like your close-up tuna salad. I was thinking about reshooting my early posts, but there is something to be said for seeing how far you’ve come. It’s posts like this that I find really inspiring!

  4. So glad to see this post!! I’m in my first year and still have a hard time getting good photographs. I work full time so i’m always cooking at night. My apartment gets ZERO natural light making shadows unavoidable. And I live with a roommate so I can’t have all my camera stuff set up all the time. UGH – People don’t understand how HARD it is!! (And now your food’s cold.) haha

    I love your blog and I love seeing how far you’ve come! Look forward to many more years of reading!

  5. Happy 6 years and to many many more!!!!!

  6. Congrats on 6 years!

  7. Congratulations! Love your photography! Fun to see how much your blog has grown!

  8. oh and duh, happy bloggaversary! :)

  9. “I’ve since learned that you have to take a step back to truly see the bigger picture.

    Such is food photography. Such is life.”

    LOVE this.

  10. I LOVE this!!! My very first post (5 years ago) was a cake that I took a photo of with my camera phone (flip phone!!) and a couple sentences about it (no recipe or anything!). I think it’s safe to say we’ve come a long way? You’ve had SO many huge accomplishments and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for you. Congrats on 6 years!!

  11. Happy blog birthday!

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