New Year, New View - Toot Sweet 4 Two

First, a silly rhyme:

New year, new view

And a couple of questions for you!

Do you, our reader, visit and read several blogs?
Do you, our reader, visit and read several food blogs?
If you do, have you noticed a change in some food blogs? A subtle shift in the photography on some food blogs?

More and more food blogs are transitioning to a “less is more” approach in their food photography. Rather than post 20 to 40 step-by-step photos with each recipe, some food bloggers now post one or three photos, only of the finished product. 99 times out of 100, those final product photo shots are awesomely glorious pictures of their finished dish. Mouth-watering, drool-worthy, Pin-worthy photos of food. Food porn.

When I finally caught on to this trend (you know I’m always Late to the Party!), I was intrigued. Why? Because while I don’t consider Toot Sweet 4 Two to be a food blog, our traffic tells me we ARE a food blog! More than 90% of our traffic, either through organic search engine results or social media driven through, mostly, Pinterest, are landing on our site because of recipe searches.

My “source of truth” has always been The Pioneer Woman. Her blog was the very first blog I ever read. By “source of truth”, I mean that because she is so successful, beyond your wildest dreams successful, I consider her blog the “touchstone” of how to succeed in a world saturated with food blogs. BTW – she didn’t start out as a food blog!

To this day, Ree Drummond, The Pioneer Woman, continues to post beautiful, photo-heavy recipes on her site, like her recent post, Sunday Frittata, which has 46 photos in it. So, I’ve been conflicted on which direction to take Toot Sweet 4 Two – to continue to post endless step-by-step food photos on recipe posts or not? That is the question…

Step-by-step food photography is a huge time-sucker. I easily take between 50 to 100 photos of each recipe, depending on the complexity of the recipe and the amount of available light in my kitchen. So, obviously, making a recipe and taking photos of each step slows down the cooking process. To post a recipe on our blog (or any blog), here are the steps:

Set up props for food photography photos.
Cook food.
Take photos of every step.
Put away props for food photography photo shoot.
Download photos to computer.
Sort photos.
Choose good photos and discard bad (cull the photos).
Edit photos: crop them, enhance exposure, correct color saturation, resize photo to fit blog and speed-up load time, add website address or copyright logo to each photo, add overlays, titles, etc.).
Load finished photo into blog post.

So, if you have 20+ photos in a blog post, you can imagine how time-consuming it is!

I’ve worked on ways to save time, such as, I create photo collages of the various steps. This saves oodles of time because 99% of the time, I don’t bother editing the photo before adding it to a collage.

I also work on posts by “batching” jobs. For example:

Over several days, I’ll take tons of photos of recipes I’m making. Sometimes I’ll have a “marathon” weekend and make anywhere from 5 to 8 recipes in a weekend.
Another day, I’ll download all those photos and sort them into folders.
Another day, I go through all the photos, deleting bad ones and organizing the rest for a post.
Another day, I’ll edit all the photos.
Another day, I’ll write the post and add the photos.

Batching works best for me!

But, even so, doing one recipe post takes me about 5 times longer than writing a regular post! Even if my regular post has 15 photos in it, it takes me at least 3 times longer to write a recipe post!

For example, my post on New Year’s Eve, 12 Favorite Quotes of 2013, took me about an hour, total, including the photos. To do one recipe post from beginning (cooking) to the end (posting) takes 4 to 5 hours. So, posting 2 recipes a week can, conceivably, take 10 hours of my time!

So, after much soul-searching, I’ve decided to change the way I share recipes. Starting now, all the recipes on Toot Sweet 4 Two will not include step-by-step instructions. Instead, I’ll concentrate on improving my photography skills and creating amazing photos of the finished recipes! Like the one at the top of this post, my Harvest Pumpkin Chili. Or the one below, Gail’s Potato Chip Cookies.

So, I’m cutting my “apron strings” from my “source of truth”, The Pioneer Woman and in this new year, adopting a new view.

And, thanks, Ree Drummond, for being a continual source of inspiration to bloggers everywhere!

Tootles,

(other recipe posts with some pretty darn good photos of the finished product {grin})

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