I want to thank everyone who entered for such an amazing turnout and quality of entries – there were 61 – yes, 61!! – total submissions for this month’s DMBLGIT.  I had such a great time hosting this month’s event and getting to see all of your wonderful images – you all truly are so inspiring, thanks so much for entering and letting me host this month. And thanks so much to Sarka, Simone, Veronika and Alessandro for being such great judges and putting forth the time and effort to go through all of the entries.

Not sure what DMBLGIT is? Read my announcement post from earlier this month detailing the event.
You can also read about and meet the judges for this month’s event.
You can also check out the Picasa album to see all the 61 submissions. 

So without further ado, let’s see who won!

Overall Winners: 

1st Place: Monika from Sweet Sensation: Cranberry & Rosemary Shortbread Cookies

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Cauliflower – a vegetable I grew up with, and wasn’t often thrilled about. Mom you know I love you, but I do not love the way you like most of your veggies cooked.

However, on my quest to enjoy more fresh produce this Winter season, I’m giving it a try again.  Cauliflower seems to abound in the markets right now and as fortune would have it, my friend Simone chose a lovely cauliflower recipe for this month’s Donna Hay Styling and Photography Challenge (DHSPC).  I enjoy participating in these challenges because they always make me reach and do something new that I might not otherwise try.  In this case, that meant not only the photo but also the recipe featuring heads of cauliflower! In fact, in the near four years that this blog has been on the interwebs, today marks the first time cauliflower has ever even appeared on Jenn Cuisine, let alone received a spotlight feature.

This month, Simone challenged us all to make a creamy cauliflower soup, which appeared in Donna Hay issue #51 (June/July 2010) and was photographed by Ben Dearnley. The soup was wonderful – cauliflower and potatoes cooked together in broth and milk and puréed until velvety smooth.  A perfect Winter bowl, better than plain boiled veggies. And even naturally gluten free!

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Thanks everyone so much for all of your participation! The deadline is officially passed and the album of entries is up on Picasa - there are some great looking food images! Today I am introducing to you the fabulous judges that will be evaluating all of the entries.  These judges are food photographers and food bloggers I look up to and admire for not only their talent but also their generosity and willingness to help others; I am sure they will take a great critical eye to pick out the winners for this month’s DMBLGIT

So without further ado, here they are! Go check out their portfolios of amazing work, follow them on twitter, facebook, etc. A great group and I’m super excited to announce them to you!

Veronika Studer - 

Portfolio: www.veronikastuder.com
Blog: The Kitchen Finesse
Facebook : Veronika Studer

I’m a Hungarian girl living in Switzerland with my hubby and my beautiful 5 month old little girl.  I always had a great interest in art. I learned how to draw and paint, but I really found myself through photography. I combine my two great passions in my work, food preparation and photographing. I also write both a Huingarian (Édes és Keserű) and an English blog called The Kitchen Finesse. If you want to take a look on my portfolio please visit my website: www.veronikastuder.com , and join me on Facebook. I’m really looking forward to see some wonderful photographs in this contest! Good luck!

Simone van den Berg - 

Portfolio: Freshfood Photos
Blog: Junglefrog Cooking
Twitter : @junglefrog
Facebook : junglefrogcooking or junglefrog
Google+ : Simone van den Berg

I’m located in Almere, which is in the middle of Holland and not one of the best culinary locations on the Netherlands unfortunately.  I started blogging about 3 years ago now and ultimately I think that doing that has made a huge difference in my professional career too. I knew virtually nothing about food photography (have a look at those earlier photos for a good laugh!) when I started blogging, even though I was already working as a photographer at that time. In fact I didn’t start out with a food blog, I think I named it something like Junglefrog Adventures. Can’t remember exactly. It took me only a couple of posts though to realize that I wanted to write about food. Doing that in the end let to my interested in food photography and a change in career plans too. Last year food photography has been roughly 50% of my total work, and so far the month of January has been food only!

Alessandro Guerani - 

Portfolio: Alessandro Guerani – fotografia
Blog: Foodografia
Twitter : @aleguerani
Facebook : Alessandro Guerani
Google+: Alessandro Guerani

Alessandro Guerani was born in 1969 in Bologna, Italy, where he still lives. He started using cameras at the age of twenty as a complement to his studies about medieval and Renaissance arts and history. His passion for the tastes and flavors of the traditional Italian cuisine, together with a period of assistantship in a professional studio, brought him to specialize in food and still life photography. His style is defined by the fresh and creative use of lighting, the careful choice of colors and contrast and the attention to the detail, which, together with a competent use of digital post processing techniques, create imagery with a very personal character. When the need arises he still uses traditional film, in medium or large format, especially when shooting lifestyle and street photography.

Sarka Babicka -

Portfolio: http://sarkababicka.com
Blog: http://cookyourdream.com
Twitter: @CookYourDream
Facebook: Cook Your Dream 

Sarka is a London based food, lifestyle and travel photographer  living in London since 2008. She was born and brought up in Prague, Czech Republic. Her passion for photography was ignited with the first photo she took for her blog Cook Your Dream. When not cooking, baking and taking mouth watering pictures, Sarka loves to travel and explore culinary art and traditions from other countries and cultures.

So there you have it, the ever talented judges for this month’s competition.  Winners will be announced on January 31st!

*DMBLGIT is a monthly food blogging competition started by Andrew of Spittoon Extra. If you are unfamiliar with DMBLGIT, I encourage you to check out my announcement post detailing this month’s contest.  If you missed the deadline for entering this month, I will be sure to link to next month’s host when I announce the winners, so that you can hopefully participate next time

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It’s a new year, everyone has new goals, how about entering one of my favorite photography food blogging competitions?

I am honored to announce that I am hosting DMBLGIT (Does My Blog Look Good in This) this month!  This has been one of my favorite food photography contests ever since I can remember falling in love with food blogging and photography online, and I’m so excited to announce it and this month and help to continue its awesomeness.  It’s the longest running online food photography contest, dating back to 2005, each month showcasing a wealth of talent from food bloggers all over the web, conceived by Andrew of Spittoon Extra.

The rules are simple – enter your photo by the deadline, and an amazing lineup of judges that I have chosen this month (who will be revealed later this month) will judge the photos and choose the winners, who will receive pretty shiny badges to put on their site

Details below:

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As a rule, I don’t make New Year’s resolutions.

New Year’s resolutions were made to be broken, or worse, completely abandoned.  Do you know anyone who has ever actually kept a New Year’s resolution throughout an entire year?   I don’t.  The problem is that in order to carry out a resolution, there needs to be a certain urgent and necessary motivation to sustain it.  Most of us create a resolution at New Year’s because it’s often a time of reflecting on our successes and trials over the past year, and so wanting to become better we say we are going to improve ourselves this year through “x”.  It all seems well and good, but if you really felt a need to alter your life in some form, would you have waited all the way until New Year’s to make that happen?

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Over the past couple of weeks I have been making these savory muffins.  I could eat them for breakfast.  Or with dinner.  Heck even for dinner!  They are surprisingly simple to make, and I think are sure to impress.  I knew I would be excited about them the minute that Simone posted this recipe for this month’s Donna Hay Styling and Photography Challenge.

As always, the first obstacle is converting the recipe to gluten free – but being corn meal based, I knew this would not be difficult.  I have made gluten free cornbread quite successfully on several occasions, and did not see any reason why these would pose any other difficulty.  Since all of the recipes Simone has posted so far list the ingredients by weight, this makes the gluten free home cook’s life much easier to come up with a substitution – as I have been learning over the past year from participating in the gluten free ratio rally, often merely replacing the same weight of conventional flour with gluten free ingredients seems to work rather well.  In this case, for the flour component, I used 2/3 rice flour and 1/3 potato starch – I kept the substitutions simple here rather than using a lot of varying ingredients because I knew gluten wasn’t really important in this recipe – it often isn’t in muffins and cakes – and so I didn’t have to worry about replicating all the culinary effects of gluten.

Next came one of my favorite parts of this blog, creating the photo!

I studied the original photo to first see what type of light was used and where it was coming from.  To me light is always the most important feature so it’s what I try to figure out first, before anything else.  The more I take the time to analyze food photos, the better I am able to glean what type of behind the scenes setup might have been used to create it.  In this case, I look at where the shadows and bright spots are – I see a shadow around the lower left of each of the plates, and notice the sheen on the cakes also indicating that the light is coming from slightly back and right, around 2:00.  The pepper shaker also gives clues – sometimes it’s easier to look at the shiniest (i.e. most reflective) element in a photo, because it will often giveaway highlights and shadows more obviously.  To recreate the image though, I would need a background that was large and light colored – one that wouldn’t take away light and that wouldn’t distract from the food – I have no such background, so decided to manipulate the light slightly differently, by putting fabric over my windows and having the light coming from behind, in a way to replicate that background but still let a lot of light in.  By angling the table 45 degrees to the window, I was still able to get a nice sheen on the cakes.  A folded white foam core helped soften shadows on the left, and an aluminum tray that I held up reflected more light to the right side.

As for the styling/composition, I kept things fairly similar.  A stack of muffins front and center (well, lower center), a plate in the background, a wine glass, and something off to the back left.  Lacking pretty white plates like the original photo, I opted for metals ones that I had instead, and lined them with white napkins so that they would still be nice and light.  The wine in the original was rather orange and honeyed looking, but not wanting to open up our fancy dessert wines from Piemonte just for a photo (which with a baby on the way I wouldn’t be able to enjoy anyways), I opted for not worrying so much about the color – in fact I lightly brewed green tea and poured that in the wine glass! Since the feature is the muffins, and this is not an ad in any way, I felt I only needed to bring about the feeling of wine and the fact that it was really tea was not so important. And lacking a silver pepper shaker, went with this pewter piece which I could envision being used to maybe spread honey or something on the muffins, and also omitted the napkin behind it.  I did add food to the back plate – it just seemed empty without something there.

When it came to the treatment of the photo, I didn’t try to replicate the original at all, but went with what I felt I liked for the image I had created.  I always like a bit of color and contrast, and I think that shows in most of the images I create.  However what I have started playing with recently is white balance.

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Every time a major holiday event comes around, I am not afraid to experiment.  I hold on to the philosophy that if the dish doesn’t come out awesome, my family will still love me, and if it comes out great, everyone will be pleasantly surprised with a new taste to try.  So I never view making a dish for the first time as a risky endeavor, and often see the holidays as an exciting time to see what new traditions I might be able to create.

This Thanksgiving was no different, as I decided to use our family event to create a totally brand-new-to-me dessert, gluten free dumplings.  These dumplings were the feature recipe for Simone’s Donna Hay Styling and Photography Challenge (DHSPC) #3 – as is tradition with these challenges, the goal is to take an image chosen from the lovely Donna Hay magazine and recreate it.  This rendition of the challenge was a cover photo by the ever talented William Meppem, of apple and caramel dumplings – perfect for the Autumn season!   While I am usually all about making new foods, I have to admit after some of the other participants’ experiences I was a little hesitant!  It seems there were a few errors in this recipe, and so it had the extra challenge of figuring out how to make it work – no matter, I’m usually improvising as I go anyways, we’ll just see what happens and hopefully there is an edible result at the end.

The first time I participated in Simone’s challenge, I had a bit of a philosophical challenge with the task of recreating an image.  This time I decided to go for a more interpretation based approach, and as always had a few extra challenges to go with it

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Today I am empty.

I am completely empty of words for you today. So, instead of my usual ramblings I present to you images.   Little details, big details, things that have made me happy and filled with joy lately.

Like this soup.  This omg amazing flavorful rich bright colorful well you just have to make it and taste it for yourself soup.

Sometimes it’s the little experiences in life that bring so much pleasure.

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It’s Fall. And like a little kid on the first day of school, I have this renewed energy to seek and find myself, create new things, and explore the world.  Maybe it’s the way the yellow Autumnal light shines through the trees or sparkles inside dew drops not yet faded away.  Maybe it’s the newfound comfort in being able to brew a cup of tea and hold it warm against your hands while the cool brisk winds remind us that the Summer has faded.  Or maybe it’s the sudden urge to curl up with a good book in the ever darkening evenings, wrapped up in one’s favorite blanket.  It’s the time of fuzzy woolen sweaters, seeing one’s breath in the air, and stomping through rain puddles.  And then just when the clouds clear, that most amazing light comes through and reminds us of the beauty of this season.

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What defines a photographic style? Is it the light one uses, the props, the angle, the composition, the settings? I kind of think all of the above.  It’s part of what makes style so hard to describe.  How does one look at a photograph and see the signature of the photographer within the image?  All of my favorite photographers have a distinct style, and I can look at any single image and instantly recognize it as theirs.  But as an amateur who is still learning, it’s hard to find a voice.  How do you figure out how to represent your vision to the world in a way that speaks only from you?  And determining of what that style comprises can become quite the soul searching process.

For me, I have always been in love with color.  Bright vibrant color.  Ha I remember when I was 5 I had this pair of shorts I loved, bright pink with bright green fishies (yeah I was stylin in the 80s, ha).  My mother for better or worse always let me choose my own clothes as a kid, and I was always a fan of bright colors – turquoise, pinks, greens, ha even my prom dress was a hot pink satin ball gown (and I totally rocked it lol).  So while I may not be the most fashion forward person, it doesn’t surprise me that as I’ve involved myself more and more into photography that I would still be in love with bright vibrant color.  Maybe too much.  I’ve been trying to tone myself down a bit (and even done some black & whites oh my!), but the truth is, I will always be a sucker for color and contrast.  And I think that’s definitely part of my style.  I also like to be close.  Really close.  I want to put you right there in front of the plate ready to dive in (well, that’s my goal!). I think I just see the world close up in technicolor, and so that’s how I express my vision of it.

And that’s really what style is about, isn’t it? How one expresses their vision of the world?  I remember a couple years ago while I was still floundering and guessing as to how to create an image, desperately seeking out my style.  But really, a style is something that evolves and happens naturally.  And it wasn’t until I got a better grasp on the technicals of what I was doing that I was able to sit back a bit and watch mine evolve.  I love experimenting with different ideas and techniques and finding out what is or isn’t me.  I’m not quite sure where I am headed but I see it developing and forming, and hopefully turning into a unique way to present the world with a vision of food and nature.

One thing I love about photographic styles is how individual they are.   No style is defined by a single aspect – it’s not about the angle of the camera, the color of the background, the softness of the light, the editing on the computer.  It’s about all the aspects of photography all combined together.  And that’s why a style is so personal – every style reveals a bit about the photographer’s soul, because it is part of how they perceive the world around them.  And it’s why at first I was hesitant to participate in this new photo challenge.

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