While I have taken a lot of food photography shots over the past few weeks for my new culinary project, I still feel like I’ve been in a bit of a rut, not branching out, and not really comfortable with my gear. A lot of that comes from being stagnant for the last part of the year. It turns out, a good photographer friend of mine found herself in the same place, so together, we decided to give ourselves weekly challenges.

When writers get writers block, some times the best course of action is to just keep writing. The same is true with photography. If you find yourself uninspired, or in a photographic rut, the best thing to do is to keep taking pictures. Best case, you work through your funk and come up with some new ideas. Worst case, maybe you learn something.

To kick it off this week, we went back to basics: white balance. Find a scene, and make an image using all the white balance settings on the camera. The goal is to get the camera out of the bag, to work the rust of the dials, and to get a refresher on how white balance affects the image.

Of course, I had to use a piece of food as my model; in this case, a load of artisan bread just out of the oven. The full set of images in the gallery below.

It was a good exercise. Especially shooting in RAW, how often do you really think about white balance? I find that 95% of the time, I’m in auto white balance because I know I’ll just correct it later in Lightroom. But really, if I took the time to set the proper white balance before I made the images even though I am shooting RAW, Lightroom could do that for me with the “As Shot” white balance setting, saving me a step in post.

I look forward to next weeks challenge, but I’m really interested in hearing your thoughts.

What do you do to work through your photographic ruts?