Saint Valentines Day Chocolate Cupcake
The latest photography assignment that Don Giannatti of Lighting Essentials gave us for Project52 was to take a photograph of chocolate. Yup, plain old chocolate.Don keeps coming up with great assignments for this project – assignments that feel real, push me to try something new, and keep my focused on my goal. Become a better photographer.
The assignment sounds simple enough, and right off the bat I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do. I have a chocolate melting pot that I planned to use to melt some chocolate, and then dip both strawberries and cherries into it! I figure dripping, melted chocolate on a red subject, with a white background would look really sweet! Luckily, before I headed over to the store I took a wander through the Flickr post for the assignment, only to find that someone else had the same great idea, and did a fantastic job with it! UGHHHHH! Now I needed a new idea, and I was struggling. Decided to get my mind off of the problem and do a little housework – somehow running the vacuum and a little bit of dusting relaxed me, and the idea of a Hershey Kiss struck me. I thought about the Vision Statement that I had created for Assignement # 1 of this project:
My photography shows you the ordinary things in life in an extraordinary way
Hershey Kiss
With the thought of my vision statement in mind, I tried to picture a Hershey Kiss in my mind, and the simplicity of the shape, the single color and thought that I could make something work, but I just didn’t find it. Tried again, using a different setup and a whole bunch of Hershey Kisses, and while that was better I just did not like how the chocolate looked. The chocolate just didn’t look smooth and perfect.
Sunday morning we ran over to my favorite local bakery to pick up some cupcakes for a birthday surprise for a friend, and bought an extra cupcake plus a piece of chocolate mousse cake to try out under the lights. The cupcake was a clear winner! The textures in the frosting on top, the heart shaped sprinkles and the little red plastic heart were perfect. The more I looked at it the closer I wanted to get to it, so I switched to my macro lens and ended up with an image that I was really happy with. And in the end I skipped lunch and act chocolate pastries for the afternoon instead. And a big cup of milk…