I have never really attempted this before, it is not really my thing. Since I am using an iPad recipe manager called Paprika, I was hoping to make the recipes look a bit better in my catalogue by adding pictures of the finished dishes. Initially I was not bothered, so I grabbed my iPhone and took some snapshots. The idea was to have a record of what I have cooked, and to add these images to Paprika eventually. The results sucked big time.
The problem with food photography is that if not done just right, the food will actually not look appetizing and it would render the photo pointless. The whole idea is to have your mouth water. So I have decided to change only three things - as I did not try to make the perfect photo, just one that would present the dish in a better way:
Spend more time laying out the food properly and appetizingly on the plate
Improve lighting
Use a camera with higher dynamic range and a faster lens for better depth of field control
Almost fifteen years ago I switched from Windows to Linux, as I was very frustrated with the way Windows turned out to become. Linux was perfect, apart from the fact that it cannot be considered a professional workstation platform due to the lack of business applications and the constant fiddling necessary to do even the most basic of tasks. So I have switched to Apple Macintosh about 12 years ago. Since then I have never looked back, until now.
Perhaps it is because Steve Jobs is no longer at the helm of Apple, who knows. All I know for a fact is that the quality of the Mac OS X platform has taken a turn for the worse. I am particularly referring to my "brand new" Mac Pro (Late 2013). Mac Pro had always been the pinnacle of Apple's computing platforms. Not necessarily the most innovative, but certainly built for their purpose - to be a workhorse workstation for professionals that demand the ultimate from their machines. They are ridiculously reliable, redundant, fast and scalable. But all that changed with the Mac Pro 2013.
In the beginning I was excited that finally Apple released an update to their ageing 2010 model Mac Pro. By 2013 their Mac Pros were using grossly outdated Xeon processors and were pretty much obsolete. Since I was already invested in the Mac OS X ecosystem, I could not just switch platforms. Besides - I loved their new laptops, both the retina MacBook Pros and the MacBook Airs. When they announced the new systems in late 2013 I placed an order for an almost maxed out system. It consists of one 6-Core Xeon 3.5GHz E5-1650v2 CPU, 64GB RAM, D500 AMD FirePro GPU and a 1TB SSD drive. Build and price the model for yourself - it works out to CAD 6300 before taxes. It is a lot of money for a computer. To top that off I have two 27" Apple Cinema displays connected to this machine - one via Thunderbolt and the other via the older Displayport interface.
WTF is wrong with domain registrars and certificate authorities? They send you warning notices about 8 months ahead of time that your domain / certificate is about to expire. They send these emails almost weekly, for a period of about 8 months leading up to the actual expiry date. It usually takes 1-2 days to renew a certificate and even less for a domain.
What makes these organizations so special? It frustrates the living crap out of me. They make it sound like it is the forthcoming doomsday of all life on this planet. And, if you DO renew early, at least for SSL certificates, the new date starts from the date you renewed - i.e. you lose the amount of time you had left on the old certificate. Good way to make money.
