Chocolate Cake
The forecast called for rain, and I needed to spend a little time with my head behind my camera. Photography is my way of relaxing and unwinding. It allows me to express myself and get creative. My wife was heading over to Le Favorite Bakery to pick up some bread, and offered to get some snacks! The deserts were chosen based on how “chocolatey” they were. Things with lots of swirly, chocolate frosting got special consideration. I was alwasy told as a child “Stop playing with your food!”, and I am kind of glad that I never listened!
With the goodies home and chilling in the refrigerator, I turned my attention to setting up my equipment. I wanted soft light, that would really wrap the entire subject. I decided to create a “tube” of light. A piece of white Plexiglass served as a base, and on each side I placed a piece of 1/8 inch thick white foam core. Foam core is the stuff that you buy at the office supply store for your kids science project. Really useful in photography to bounce light around! I then placed another piece of white foam core above, to serve as a top to my little tunnel. A flash was placed at each end, and aimed at the inside of the tube. This allows the light to bounce all over inside the tunnel, creating a very soft even light.
Chocolate Cup Cake
My camera was setup with my 100mm macro lens, so that I could get in nice and close, and fill the frame with my subject, yet still be able to focus. I love being able to get close and in tight with these types of subjects, and really magnify the small details in something as simple as a cupcake. The simple swirl of the frosting can become as giant and powerful as an oceans wave. I set my shutter speed to 1/200th of a second to kill any of the ambient light, so that all the light on my subject comes solely from my flashes. I had my aperture set to f/16 and f/18 so that I could get an acceptable Depth of Field. ISO was set to 200 to keep any noise to a minimum. Both flashes were set to 1/8 power, and were zoomed in tight, creating a narrow, focused beam of light to ensure as much of the light as possible made it into the tunnel.
St Patricks Day Chocolate Cupcake
When it came time to shoot the St Patrick’s Day cupcake I knew that I wanted to create an image that had more drama, and mystery. I changed up my lighting scheme to be much more directional in nature. The swirls in the chocolate frosting looked like they had been precision carved with a knife, and I wanted to replicate that carved feel, but with light. I put one flash in an Apollo 28″ softbox 90 degrees camera right, and in very close. This gave me some directional light that had a nice falloff from right to left, and created nice, deep shadows in the swirls of chocolate. I then added a flash with a grid from camera left, and behind the cupcake. This added light to the tops of the swirls of chocolate, as well as helped to make the shamrock ring really sort of glow. I had to up my ISO to 400 and open up my aperture to F/11 to get an acceptable exposure.
All of the images were shot in RAW, with the development all done in Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom 3. Processing is very basic – setting a Camera Calibration, adjusting the white balance, increasing contrast with a Tone Curve and some overall sharpening. I additionally adjust the exposure settings and will go in and saturate individual colors for both saturation and luminance.
I hope that you enjoy these images as much as I enjoyed making them. You can find more examples of my food photography on both my Facebook Fan page, or on my FLickr site.