One of the things I find frustrating about photography is that the more I learn and the more my skills improve, the less inclined I am to simply take a quick picture of something or someone. This sometimes results in no picture at all.
Today was a case in point. My wife made a fantastic cake for our youngest son’s birthday tomorrow. I was so impressed with the cake that I thought I’d better capture it. This started the little internal battle in my head over whether I should do it properly or just simply point the camera at it on auto (or even use my iPhone) just to record it.
In the end, doing a proper job won and I thought it would be interesting to document the process. The first image shown below is the finished item. For comparison, the second image shows the cake lit by only the ambient light in the room – what I would have got if I’d just let the camera do its own thing.
Ambient Light Only
There’s nothing particularly wrong with the ambient only image but it can be made better with the controlled addition of my own lighting as seen in Image 1.
So first things first. I want to use the ambient light in the room as my overall fill for the image and then add my own lights where I need them to try and create some shape and form to the cake. The first stage is to set the camera to underexpose the ambient light by 1 stop. From memory the ambient was just under f/4.0 so the camera was set to f/5.6. Without adding lights the image now looks as follows:-
Next stage is to add in my key light at my working aperture of f/5.6. The key light here is a 19″ Damian McGillicuddy DMLS Beauty Dish placed off to camera right at about 45 degress and raking across the cake. This gives some shape to the image by creating highlight and shadow sides on the barnacles and the pieces of treasure. The image below is the cake with the key light and the ambient fill only:-
Its starting to look better but the addition of a separation light will really help to lift the cake out of the background and create a more 3-D feel to the image. I placed a 2nd light about 3ft behind the cake pointing back at camera and metered at a stop over my working aperture. Whilst this gave me the separation I was looking for it also introduced a new problem by lighting the table behind the cake. See image below:-
The solution was pretty simple and involved placing a cushion such that it blocked the light from hitting the table but still letting it hit the top of the cake. The final finessing involved increasing the shutter speed to knock down even more of the ambient light resulting in the final image which is repeated below. No post processing other than a slight crop and a tiny vignette.
Nom Nom!
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