Plate to Pixel by Hélène Dujardin

If you are a food blogger who wants to improve your pics, Plate to Pixel by Hélène Dujardin is an absolute must read. 

I learned such a lot about the best camera settings, lighting, reflectors, food styling etc – not that I've put it into practice yet!  But I've renewed the book and will be reading it again and then searching out a copy to buy.

Probably the most important thing I found out was that for almost all food photography you should shoot in Aperture Priority mode!  Who knew!

The other thing I realised that I had been doing wrong was to put food on bright cheerful plates – while the plates themselves are attractive, they are actually distracting attention from the food.  So now I'm going to have to look out for some more muted shades.  I guess it will take some time to improve!

The pics in this post are from the book – so you can see the sort of work the author does.  She is a blogger and the name of her blog is Tartelette.

For Bloggers' Eyes Only

This post is just to let you know about the little sub blog I have started – it is called Carole's Chatter Blog Tips - not very original name, I know.  I have learned so much in my blogging journey that I just wanted to share some of the stuff I have learned with others who might find it helpful.  A number of you have found it already – which is quick off the mark!

The topics I have covered on it to date are:

How to kill the "prove you are a robot stuff" on Blogger!

How to code a link in a comment on someone else's blog

How I created a recipe thumbnail page the easy way using Pinterest

The Importance of Photos

Managing your label cloud or list in Blogger

Getting the best from Google Searches

And topics that are coming up in the next little while include:

The Blogs I Follow Gadget

Google Friend Connect Followers sidebar

How to crop a screenshot and put it into your blog

Follow back etiquette

Replying to comments

So do stop by if you are interested in any of these topics.  I will be adding others as I do them.  Hope you find it useful – particularly if you are a newer blogger.  Happy blogging.

Limited time offer - dealing to word verification

For those of you using Blogger Only

If any of you would like to get rid of the pesky word verification (prove you are not a robot etc) stuff so that people can comment more easily on your posts, but you don't know or can't remember how to do that - then help is at hand.

If you post a comment on this post with your blog address in it, I will comment back on your blog with a step by step guide on how to kill it off - which I did for a blog friend a little while ago.

Cheers and happy blogging.

For Bloggers' Eyes Only

Hi fellow bloggers:

If you don't know how to code a link in html in a comment, I hope this post will help you.  If you already, know look away now.

I had to print out the explanation and then scan it as an image because if you put it into the post it just codes it so you can't see how it's done… duh!

So, here it is.

PS  To turn off smart quotes in Word 2010, you click through the following:

File, Options (second from bottom), Proofing, Auto Correct Options, Auto Format as you Type, then unclick the first box which is Straight Quotes to Smart Quotes.

Unbelievable that you have to click so many times to change this!

Happy blogging!