The Blog of Photographer Jacob Vorpahl.
In two completely unrelated events, as of 12:01am last night , I’m now 27 and I also have another cupcake picture for you. Though, if these cupcakes were what I got instead of a cake, you’d hear no complaining out of me.
My wife, along with another lady she took a cake decorating class with, got together to make a batch of cupcakes for a small reception some friends of ours were having. The last time I took a picture of her cupcakes, I picked the best one (or the one I liked the most) out of all that she made and took a picture of just the one. This time, I decided I wanted to find a way to incoporate all of them.
Now the focus of talking about this cupcake picture is not because it is a spectacular picture. It’s nice, but the main idea is this: sometimes pictures can be easy to make. Those of us who love to get creative with our pictures seem to find so many ways to make them complicated that we end up not taking any because we think it requires too much effort. Sure, sometimes they do take a while to set up and orcestrate, and then sometimes they only take a few minutes.
When Sarah came home with the boxes of these cupcakes, she mentioned that the lady she made them with loved the picture of the last one I took and joked that I should take some of these. I agreed that was a good idea and went and grabbed my stuff. I wanted to get them all in the shot this time, and I had the composition already set up in my head. The only thing I needed to do was create the environment necessary to get what I wanted. It literally took all of five minutes.
First, the picture, what did I want? I wanted all the cupcakes in the shot, with the focus on a select few. I wanted a nondistracting surface for them to be set on and I wanted soft, undistracting light, coming from a slight angle to accent the edges of the icing with a tiny bit of shadow. Simply enough.
For my nondistracting surface, I wanted something white. So I went and grabbed a white bed sheet from the closet and threw it on the table, straightened it out, then put down the cupcakes. I wanted soft light at a slight angle, so I went grabbed an SB800, a light stand and an umbrella. I grabbed an umbrella because I didn’t care about spill since the shot was going to be in close enough for it not to matter (this will explain a little why spill is important). I tinkered with the cupcakes a little as I looked through my viewfinder, moved them around here and there, adjusted the flash with CLS and my commander menu, and boom, five minutes, picture done. This is the setup shot once everything was in order:
And, of course, here is the final shot (and a little bit bigger than the one above):
Now, the unfortunate part of this whole setup was a goof on my fault. I let someone borrow my camera recently so they could test the DSLR waters and I put the pictures settings on JPG medium quality so they could get more pictures on their SD card. Of course, I forgot to set it back to RAW or high quality so I lost some contrast and color depth, but, live and learn. The experience was enough to justify it and I still have a half decent photo evidencing my wife’s work. Well worth the five minutes it took.
