One of my toxic traits is I watch YouTubes about bullet journaling and planning etc and pretend it’s the same as getting my life organized. So I was watching Jashii Corrin, and I really liked her idea of “24 24s in 2024″—24 things you want to do 24 times in 2024. I haven’t totally decided on my 24 things yet, but one is to make 24 new recipes (kind of a softball for somebody who likes to cook/bake as much as I do, but whatever).

My other toxic trait is I buy books about hobbies and pretend it’s the same as doing that hobby. In particular, I have three books on food photography. I think you can tell where this is going…

1/24: My first recipe is nothing exciting, just Quaker oatmeal cookies. I don’t believe I’ve made this recipe before—I’m not huge on oatmeal cookies. I made them because I wanted to trick JP into eating something with fiber. It didn’t work. 🙂

The only good light was in a patch on the living room floor, so obviously I put the plate on the floor. My books say you should try to make your photos DYNAMIC with little details so I figured I’d throw some oats around. So, Bren came into the living room to see me sitting on the floor sprinkling oats all over the place. But he’s been married to me long enough that he didn’t ask any questions. Later, JP was so offended by my “HUGE MESS” that she got her tiny broom out and tried to sweep up.

I don’t love the background, which is too similar in color to the oats. The oats aren’t a terrible filler but you can’t see them. 🙂 I need a wider variety of backdrops. I do like the light and the shadow of the little cup. But composition? Never heard of her. There is too much empty space in the top of the photo.

One of my other attempts was more of a flat-lay…I like the background better in this, but it was a table runner so I didn’t have much to work with (basically flat-lay by necessity). I kinda like this one, but it seems very plain. Maybe I needed more oats on other lower right side. That said, this one feels a little better, I think because the cookies are filling more the frame so it feels fuller. That said, the dark spot in the middle is really annoying.

PS, on some baking group I saw somebody recommend shaping drop cookies into more of a cylinder so that when they bake they are a little thicker in the middle. 10/10 will continue using this technique.

BTW, one of my other 24s is blog posts. THIS IS A TRIPLE WHAMMY