I Came ... I Saw ... I Conquered: BlogHer Food '11 Conference

Day 1: Welcome w/BlogHer Founders Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins

The keynote speakers have packed up their bags and traveled back to their respective cities, the closing party at The Tabernacle is a distant memory, and another session of BlogHer Food ’11 is in the proverbial bag.

The agenda was replete with guest speakers, interviews, sponsor demos and samplings, an Atlanta excursion, break-out sessions and, of course, food.

This was my inaugural journey into the world of food blogging conferences. What made this conference a little out of the norm for me was the target audience: Women. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Girls Rock! No offense to the male bloggers in attendance, but BlogHer is a network of female bloggers. Having said that, the gentlemen were certainly welcomed with open arms.

As a writer and a blogger, it did my heart good to meet so many others who, like myself, have such a profound love for food and the culinary world that they don’t mind admitting a) at times, they may slip into food comas, b) eating and writing about food is almost as satisfying as sex, c) it is wholly possible for people to have love affairs with food and d) food, and all that it entails, should be certified as the Eighth Wonder of the World (after all, humans created the list; humans can modify the terms as they relate to current times).

After all the hoopla was said and done, did I actually learn anything at BlogHer Food ’11?

Without any compunction, I can say that I walked away from the conference with more knowledge than I arrived with. Ironically, most of that awareness came from the very last session that I attended, “Simple, Affordable Tools, Techniques and Accessories to Improve Your Food Photography,” moderated by Sarah Olson and Alice Currah.

Unfortunately, I am not a food stylist. I do, however, know a great food photograph when I see it. Sometimes I manage to coax a phenomenal shot from my camera, but more often than not luck is not on my side. Having upgraded my camera from a point-and-shoot to a fancy schmancy DSLR has helped immensely, but I will admit without a hint of humility that it’s going to take a lot more than a camera with gizmos to help me out.

“Skill” is one of those words you wouldn’t use in the same sentence as “Valerie” when it comes to photography. However, my confidence level has improved tenfold, thanks to the easy to understand, to-the-point advice given by the panel. So now, I will take this newfound knowledge and run with it . . . but I won’t run too fast; I don’t want to break my new camera.

So now the big question for me is this: Do I see a BlogHer Food ’12 in my future? Possibly. However, as a veteran of numerous writing conferences of the creative ilk—and again, I reiterate that this was my first time attending a conference with such a narrow range of focus—sometimes the information that you ‘learn’ becomes repetitive and the ability to garner new information becomes more difficult.

The bottom line for me, however, is clear. I may have picked up some great ideas, I may have learned a few new techniques, and quite possibly I have widened the girth of my contact list. But the very best acquisitions that I have brought home with me to Stamford, CT from BlogHer Food ’11 has to be the new friendships that I formed.

Whether these friendships will be lasting and sustaining is a-whole-nother story. But, naively or not, I like to think that once a friend, always a friend—at least to some degree. And if we have absolutely nothing else in common, we always have that one delicious unifying commonality: Food.