Sunday, September 12, 2010

keeping busy and finding success

I have been working hard on my food blog recently and it's taking up a lot of my time, but in a nice way. I feel like I'm actually doing something with my life instead of just wasting away. I don't even consider myself excellent in the kitchen, but I do love food and I do enjoy making food. I have had some little successes already, having had a photograph accepted by Photograzing (you can see it here) and I have just discovered that if I google certain keywords, I can see my blog pop up in the results - for example, I've managed to squeeze in to the first page of Google results with a search of "chanterelle omelette". Considering my first food blog post was less than two weeks ago, I am pretty happy with all these developments. Hopefully the good run will continue!

These are a few of the things I think really helped me so far:

Content and equipment:
I try to keep my writing conversational and, hopefully, interesting and/or informative. I have a nice little Canon S90 camera, which isn't a DSLR but does have manual settings and can take pretty good pictures. I am still learning to use it, and I think I'm getting better at it. I try to keep my page easy to navigate and not too cluttered.

Research:
I did my research before getting a camera, and I am really pleased with it. In terms of content, I do research too, as I like experimenting with new ingredients and I find it helps to ask the purveyor to tell me more about something I'm interested in using, as well as reading up on it online. I've also taken it upon myself to learn a few things about how to use online social communities and SEO (search engine optimization), etcetera, to reach a wider audience. Also, I am not very knowledgeable with design, widgets, HTML and the like - I'm working on being more familiar with those, as I know my blog is still lacking in many aspects.

Support from family and friends:
It so happens that my boyfriend is a photography buff, and he has been teaching me how to get the most out of my camera, which is wonderful. He has also brought out his DSLR and personally contributed one or two pictures when I wasn't as happy with the ones I took myself. My family has been following my blog, and my friends have been coming up to me telling that they have been reading it, which I truly appreciate. All of these things spur me on.

There are still many challenges ahead, and many things to learn. The journey has been fun and exciting so far, and I hope it will continue to be!

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

my favourite cat

This is my cousin's cat, one of the many things that bring warmth and happiness to my life. I think he's absolutely gorgeous. I just want to squeeze him! Sigh.

dozing off... tres adorable.

Friday, September 3, 2010

exciting times

I've neglected this blog a little over the past several days, but here I am again! So here are the things I've been up to...

After receiving my Canon S90 in the mail about a week ago, I've been experimenting with it and I think I'm getting better at using it already! So we may see some photographs on this blog soon.

I've also started another blog (with a focus on food) where I've already put my new camera to good use - I am just slightly apprehensive about juggling two blogs at the same time, but we'll see how it goes. My reasoning for keeping things separate is that if I were to include food posts in this blog, there would be so many devoted to those that they would overwhelm the other subjects.

I also had an interview at work today for an internal position, which I think went quite well. I don't think I would mind too much if I don't get it, but if I do it should be interesting to have that change in scenery.

I talked about productivity and persistence only a couple of weeks ago, and it would appear that, spurred on by my own musings, I am both consciously and subconsciously making changes to my life already, going by these recent developments. So yes, exciting times indeed!