Our shoot this weekend was canceled due to some complications from the blizzard last week, so for once I have time to do our sadly neglected photography tip posts!
As promised a few weeks ago, this tip is all about my lighting trick for cake pictures.
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I am a HUGE fan of cake pictures (probably because I am such a huge fan of cake), and one of the most important things in a cake picture is that it show a sense of dimension. How do we show dimension in a photo? With shadows. When one side of an object is in light and the other in shadow, we can see the shape of it better.
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If you use straight on flash, or even bounce from the wall behind your camera, you’re going to make that cake look a little flat. What you want with cakes is side lighting. Cakes are usually put in a corner of the reception room, which makes creating side lighting VERY easy. I just turn my flash head so that it bounces off the wall to the side of the cake.
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This lighting tip isn’t just relavent for cakes–it’s a great tip for anything that you need to show dimension for. You know what’s like a cake? A pregnant belly!
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Totally different subject, but the same basic problem–it’s a round object but if you use lighting from head-on, you’re not going to be able to tell that it’s round. So you need to use side lighting, and I shot this belly in the exact way that I would a cake–bouncing light from the wall to my left.
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