I decided some time ago that I wanted to get into blogging but as with many things in life this is not as simple as it sounds. For a start what to blog about? I have many passions in life; I’m a foodie, I am an obsessive photographer, I love films, I’m a geeky gamer girl and I work with animals and have a degree in zoo management. I decided to go with food blogging and photography because it combines two things I cannot live without, food and my camera! Now admittedly I might be being a tad melodramatic when I say I can’t live without my camera but it is in my hand more often than its not!

I love photographing food almost as much as I love eating it. Food can be so photogenic whether it’s brightly coloured sweets, a steaming bowl of soup and rustic looking bread or the art on a plate found in good restaurants. However it’s also challenging and frustrating as it very easily goes horribly wrong leaving you with a cold meal and a shot that looks like it belongs in a dodgy kebab shop window!

I didn’t know much about blogging so I bought a magazine but I had more questions than answers after reading it so I shopped around for blogging courses and found a great sounding course on the Guardian Masterclasses page: Introduction to food blogging and photography run by Joan Ransley. Joan is an amazing food photographer and the author of blogs Cooking for the Sensitive Gut and Joan Ransley Food Writing and Photography. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to learn from her so I signed up.

We needed to take our own food to photograph and I decided I wanted to take sweets, retro sweets, the sort of sweets that would give your dentist a headache! Two of London’s finest sweet shops instantly came to mind; Mrs Kibbles Olde Sweet Shoppe at St Christopher’s Place, a tiny shop packed to the rafters with sweets of practically every size shape and colour you could imagine and the bright, colourful and huge confectionary department of Selfridges & Co on Oxford Street.

As I tried to cram my laptop, all of my photography equipment, my props and my rather large carrier bag of sweets into my sizable rucksack I realised it was going to take a bigger bag… my suitcase! I was a bit worried I’d look daft turning up to the course with a suitcase but fortunately everyone else seemed to be in the same boat and I didn’t look daft at all! Speaking of boats, The Guardian offices are in the most beautiful setting, from the front it doesn’t look much but when you get inside the rooms are floor to ceiling windows looking out onto a rather lovely canal and the coffee and food bars look out onto the canal moorings through equally magnificent windows.

The first half of the day was mainly theory based with Joan passing on her blogging and photographic wisdom to us. Joan took time to get to know each of us, explained things in a way that was easy to understand and happily answered our questions. We covered blogging first and she answered all the questions I had and some I didn’t even know I had. Then we covered photography, Joan is largely self-taught and this comes across in her teaching; she delivers your information in a real world way. I often find that photographers like to make photography sound like some enigma that only the gifted can crack but it’s really not that complex when explained well. The theory side was followed up with a slightly too brief demo of Joan’s photography skills; she works so quickly and smoothly and results are stunning!

After this demo we broke for lunch which was a massive bowl of chicken and mushroom linguine; there was another option but as you will come to realise if you stick with my blogging escapades I love pasta and you pretty much can’t beat chicken and mushroom as a combination so that was a winner.

In the afternoon we put our newly gained knowledge into practice I realised early on that I had too much with me but it did allow me to be selective about which sweets and props went together and which complimented the photo and which just looked like there had been an explosion at Willy Wonka’s factory! Overall I got some decent shots and I’m quite proud of them. I am posting the unedited versions with this blog as I want to show you the results that I achieved on the day.

I’m signed up to the guardian masterclasses mailing list now so that I don’t miss out on any great courses; new courses are getting added all the time and they also have offers and sales on from time to time. They provide a variety of courses so there is pretty much something for everyone and the prices and course length vary depending on what course you choose so it doesn’t have to be expensive; Joan’s was certainly worth the money we paid and I would have happily paid more if it had been a two day course! As for the Guardian’s side of things it was well organised and they sent out plenty of information beforehand. The offices are really easy to find (the big glass building on King St just behind Kings Cross station) and once you’re inside they staff are welcoming, helpful and polite.

I hope you enjoyed my first blog, I’ve just been to the Leeds Food and Drink Festival  and will be writing about that next.