And baking the thing is not the finish line. It’s barely the halfway point. After the recipe works, I still have to decide what the photo even is. Is it the whole loaf or the slice? Is a hand in the frame? What are we saying about the texture, and can you feel it from a screen? For a long time I hardly put photos on the blog at all. Now I put in more, because I want you to be able to see the crumb, and seeing the crumb is a separate project from making the crumb.

I never thought about any of this when I started. Not once. It is a job on its own, and nobody mentions that when you decide to start a food blog.

Now let me tell you about the strobe.

I bought a proper one. Spent real money on it, because I looked into what the professionals use, and this was what the professionals use. It arrived. I was delighted. I set it up expecting it to simply fire and make everything better.

That is not what a strobe does.

You have to make it work with your camera, and how you do that depends entirely on which camera you have. There are settings. There are relationships between settings. My background is in filmmaking, which I assumed would transfer, and I want to report that filmmaking and photography are two different disciplines wearing similar equipment. This has been an adjustment. I have spent this entire past week researching how to actually use the thing I already own.

I will get there. But it is currently one of the banes of my existence, and I would rather tell you that than pretend the strobe and I are getting along.

Editing is the other half nobody counts. It isn’t a filter. You are trying to get the colors true, so the thing on the screen is the thing that came out of my oven, and then get them to pop enough that your eye stops on it. Those two goals pull against each other constantly. It took me a long time to understand what I was even doing in there. I’m much better now than when I started, and I am still learning, and I expect both of those to remain accurate for a while.

Here is the one line I do not cross.

The recipe comes first. Always. I decide what I want to make, I make it until it works, and only then do I think about how to photograph it. I have never once thought this might shoot well, so let’s develop that instead. I’ve considered whether I should, in some strategic sense, and then I remember that I got into this because I love to bake. If I ever reach the point where the camera is choosing my recipes, something has gone wrong with me and I need to get checked.

Which is not to say I don’t have favorites. Chocolate photographs beautifully. I don’t fully know why. Something about a dark, glossy thing against a white backdrop, and the way the color comes alive when I edit it. That birthday cake up at the top was one of the best days I have had behind a camera. I have to actively stop myself from filling the calendar with chocolate, because you deserve recipes that aren’t all brown, and I owe the vanilla and the lemon and the bread the same attention.

Speaking of the bread. September is Back to Basics, a month of gluten-free bread machine loaves, and I will tell you plainly that it has stressed me out more than anything else I’ve worked on this year. I’m still going. It’s coming. If you own a bread machine, next month is for you.

And then there are the days it simply does not work. The oatmeal raisin cookies were one of those. A full day, the whole setup, and I came back to the computer to find that almost none of it was usable. So I went through all seventy, found the one where the white balance hadn’t betrayed me, edited it as well as I possibly could, and used it.