Taking Steps Forward

I had a lot of fun this past weekend as I had my first "photo shoot" which is something I've never done before. A portrait photographer friend of mine came to my apartment with his fancy lighting equipment to take some shots of me cooking which was just so awesome. Since this is the first time I/we have ever done anything like this, it didn't go totally as I'd hoped in terms of certain shots. There are a lot of ideas I have that I want to try again so we're going to schedule a second shoot in the very near future.

This shoot for me was sort of like a place to begin with some reinforcement in the confidence area of cooking. I don't mean to say I'm not confident in my abilities - I very much am - but it was neat for me to see some shots of myself while preparing dinner from start to finish. I surely don't ever get to see that unless I were to take video of myself which is just plain weird. :P Looking at myself through the eyes of how someone else views what I'm doing is just so cool and totally reinforces how I feel about this passion of mine. I'm waiting on him to finish editing and I'm hoping that some shots came out really well. If not this time around, then it was good practice and I can't wait for the next time we set something up.

In addition, my friend out in Washington state put me in touch with his sister who works for allrecipes.com. She works with a ton of culinary experts and she's passed along a guy's info who used to be a personal chef. I was so thrilled that she gave me his info and I wrote him yesterday. It will be so exciting to hear firsthand how he began and what his journey has been like, good and bad. I have very few resources in the culinary world so I want to learn things and educate myself to become a more well rounded "chef". :)

PS - On a completely unrelated note, I saw 'Shutter Island' over the weekend too and loved it. You'd have to be a Scorsese fan to really understand some of what he was doing but it was smart, so well made, and so 'him'. Who can deny that Leonardo DiCaprio is just freakin' good, either? See it.