A couple weekends ago, I decided to make French toast. Danny had just gotten back from his Saturday morning bike ride down to Ponce Inlet and back, and we had a birthday party, filled with food, to go to at 1:00. But we needed something to eat then, and I needed to feel like I’d actually used my stove that week, after a bunch of dinners out and more frozen and fast food than I’d care to fess up to, and a week of cafeteria food awaiting me at Camp Kulaqua. So I opened the pantry and spotted the loaf of sourdough I’d bought, planning a French toast feast. Maybe we wouldn’t be feasting, with sides of bacon and hash browns, but French toast sounded perfect.

I pulled out the griddle, a carton of eggs, my favorite French toast recipe, and got some butter sizzling on the stove. Two pieces of sourdough, soaked in the egg-milk-cinnamon-nutmeg-vanilla mixture, went onto the griddle, and I watched the steam rising.Those first two slices of French toast didn’t come out quite as planned. They stayed kind of soggy and just got tough through some combination of bad flipping technique, incorrect stove temperature, and my general forgetfulness when it comes to making French toast the right way. But they looked okay. The next two slices went a little better. The two after that were a perfect crispy golden-brown on the outside, melt-in-your-mouth silken on the inside. Add a splash of pure maple syrup, and Danny and I had a feast after all.

As I flipped those last two slices of French toast, the analogy between French toast and photography leaped in front of me like butter dancing across the hot griddle. It was so obvious.

When I started out as a photographer, it was hard for me to get everything right — the posing, the exposure, the composition — all at once. The results were all right. People liked them. But “soggy” and “tough” adequately describe some of my photography efforts, not just my first attempt at French toast. So I spent more and more time practicing and honing. My work got better; just as I learned how frequently I should (or shouldn’t) flip each slice of toast, I figured out what camera settings would give me the results I wanted; I learned to use light, instead of trying to overcome it, to create more dramatic or dreamy portraits; I got comfortable posing couples and carrying on a conversation and working my camera settings all at the same time. And eventually, my straight out of camera pictures became clean and beautiful and even, sometimes, breathtaking — the photographic equivalent of crispy golden-brown on the outside.

It takes a lot more time and effort to truly master photography than to learn to produce yummy French toast. And I’m the first to admit that I’m probably never going to be able to say I’ve “mastered” photography. Or French toast. There is always something more to learn — but I’m working on it. One photo, one slice at a time.

~ Laura