Lighting a Birthday cake smash

 Alongside creating the questionnaire that I will conduct to find out if there is consensus the term atmospheric, I wanted to advance my skills in lighting.  from my research conducted previous semester I know that lighting plays a key part in creating atmosphere with an image. On the weekend of the 21st of February I had the opportunity there for the test lighting.  I bought myself my first studio lamp with the aim of taking pictures of my son who was turning 1 in a cake smash photo shoot.

initially my wife and I conducted research on Pinterest to collect a number of ideas about how to create the cake smash. My job was to take the mood board that we had created find out how they were created and get the equipment required to be able to replicate this.

 

The images found in terms of lighting very flat everything was very well and evenly lit which would mean that I would need to create past area of soft light in order to create this.  

The reason that I had bought a studio strobe was previously I had been using a speedlight.I have found that the speedlight was ok but I did not find it powerful enough.  directing the light directly at the subject create harsh shadows and reflecting light of the ceiling create the much nicer light but I found that I had to compromise on camera settings in order that they would be exposed properly.  I also found that the speedlight took a significant amount of time to recharge after each shot. when researching studio strobes I wanted to get one that had a much shorter recycle time because in my previous experience of taking pictures of my children I had found that often they would do a lot of interesting things in a very short space of time and I wanted to be able to take as many shots in that short space of time to be able to capture the best moment.  Often when using the speedlite I would find that I would have one good workspace shot with three or four shots in almost pitch black where the speedlight had not fired.  when I did my testing pre-shoot I found that the studio strobe was far better in the recycle time but there still was a little compromise between power output of the flash and the ISO setting on my camera the more light that the strobe with output pulling a longer recycle time so I had to carefully balance this.  I compromised on my camera being set at three frames a second and that the flash would fire on every other shot. My hope was this would greatly reduce the number of black frames as I would not be holding down the shutter continuously when taking pictures.  

In terms of props the first thing that I had to do was to get a suitable background to do the photo shoot on from all the Pinterest images we can see that they have blue infinite background so I would need to find something appropriate I did research on Amazon and looked at getting a vinyl backed up so that it would enable me to clean it off the cake smash and potentially use it if need be. Elected a two by two metre canvas give me enough space so that I would able to take pictures and the field of view camera would not stray too far beyond the edges of the backdrop.  I didn't know that this wouldn't be a massive problem as long as all key elements were inside the backdrop I could simply Photoshop any areas of the camera captured though outside the backdrop.

The vinyl backdrop that I ordered arrived and to my dismay I had found it being delivered folded meaning that the backdrop was covered with creases online reviews had also commented on the folds and claim that they can be easily ironed out.  I did attempt to do this but with no such luck in my opinion what was delivered to me was not vinyl but some sort of polyester fabric that was not suitable but awful for taking photos against and I'm not spending my time attempting to Photoshop out creases that the camera captured I want to concentrate on the creative process of creating images not in having to edit out the problems.  this backdrop was promptly returned.  Next time I will take greater care in reading the reviews of the product before purchasing as the images of the product were very misleading.

 

Deciding that the vinyl backdrop was not going to be appropriate in that on Amazon I probably wouldn't be able to find something that actually was vinyl by then elected to look for a rollback drop made from paper.  I have seen these being used in other photographic studios such as on campus and one of blogs that I've seen and I knew that the cake smash would probably destroy the paper but my priority was the fact to have a flat and creased infinite backdrop take good photos on I was less worried about the re usability of the paper.  I then ordered this I'm the one I found that was the correct colour blue wasn't as wide so it was only 1.35 metres wide but came at 10 metres of length so I have more than enough length to play with but I'd be more limited in width which will probably result in more post production photo shopping but larger roles far more expensive and I wanted to see what I could get away with.   

 Kidlets Photography (Aly 2021)

The setup

Once the paper roll had arrived I was far more impressed with the evenness of the paper.  prior to the cake smash I want to set up all the equipment and the props in such a way that I could perfect the lighting before the actual photo shoot. This would mean that I would have a backdrop that on the day if everything went wrong I would have a perfect set in which two Photoshop in my child if need be.  as well I could workout lighting requirements would be I have stopped shutter speed again I would have limited time with my child he is not going to wait for me to get the camera settings correct so it was prudent to do this all the night before.  

What I did not have with my studio light was a softbox I had ordered one but it was not going to arrive in time and didn't think it was large enough anyway what I like to do who wants to hang a bed sheet from the wall to the light fixture the place that is close to the scene as I possibly could from previous tutorials that I had seen and workshops that I've been on the closer light sources to the subject more even the light will be as the bed sheets was so large it effectively gave me a massive softbox.

or then place the cake into the scene and found ‘appropriate’ item to place into the scene to evaluate the shadows that would be cost from the flash.  I have seen they have often been two or three point lighting sources in order to create front lighting and I would be using just the one so I want to see whether or not my setup would be suitable (Long 2017).  images below you can see that despite petrol pony being one metre 35 lot took up a lot of portion of the frame which is good meaning that it has to little better shopping afterwards the amount to shadow cast was minimal and the objects were very evenly lit in the scene.  I then proceeded to hang the rest of the decorations and take so more test shots that encompassed the whole scene I did have to adjust the softbox made from the sheet slightly as I was getting light spillages from the flash.

  

On the Day

After the test photo shoot I had packed away everything so that in the morning when my two children came downstairs that they would not immediately jump on it then destroy it.  my intention was that after they had breakfast my sister in law would arrive and then take my eldest son upstairs so that he would not interfere with the cake smash.  this did mean however that it took a bit of time to set up the whole set again in the morning and we wanted to get the cake smash done before my youngest son's first nap of the day. mostly the setup was a identical to what I tested in the previous day with only minor changes to where the ducks were laid out the bunting and the cake was positioned.  I have now noticed that when I took my test photographs the previous day that my camera was significantly higher than where the eyes of my son would be in the actual shoot.  Due to this different angle it effectively made all my test shots the previous nicest redundant as it would be very difficult for me to Photoshop him in if everything went wrong.  I also had the addition of letters ‘O N E’ that I was not able to place in the test shoot because I was still painting at the time.

 

Looking at my first pictures of the shoot I could see that the camera angle was similar to my pre shoot in that the camera was far higher than the high level of my child it took me a few shots to reposition myself to what I considered a more pleasing angle. I'd also wanted to place my child in the scene prior to the cake again give me the ability to Photoshop the scene if my child destroyed the cake very quickly.  But as I found out very quickly without a cake to distract my child he was more interested in the decorations around him rather than looking at the camera as everything was new.  so then I just bought in the cake and started to shoot.

During the shoot I found myself moving around considerably to try and compose a shot correctly in a way to get all the elements within the frame and position myself in a way that would get my child and the cake in right position I did find that as I moved around some of the elements were falling outside the background which I knew would make the post production far more difficult 

  

Luckily for me he had never seen a cake before and didn't really know what to do with it he spent the first 5 to 10 minutes just prodding it getting bored and wandering offset .this enabled me to get the number of shots where the cake was fully intact and he was looking at the camera.  I would use these as the base image for any further images if I need to do any considerable amount photo shopping. I did find it a little bit hard trying to keep everything in scene I placed sign to the left and I really had to concentrate on positioning my camera in such a way that they would fall into the backdrop.  as I knew that anything falling outside the drop backdrop would incur a significant amount of post processing to correct.

 I found that the flash settings were appropriate I think from the whole shoot, I took around 200 pictures in the cakesmash only 4 of which the flash did not fire.  

Postproduction

My wife and I went through all the photos and she selected the ones that she wanted to be edited. This was a considerable batch but she wanted to see them all in their final form before selecting her favourites.  In the end I edited 11 pictures to what I would consider the final product. During the editing process it was quite repetitive I had to remove the scene that did not fall within the backdrop open over again for each shot. I did attempt to just do this once and then remove all the elements from the frame so that I could just drop in the new scenes on top of it this did work for a number of the images but when I changed my angle I then had to re edit from scratch.

Certainly for next time I would definitely consider far wider backdrop I think this one is more appropriate for portraits of adults standing where there more tool and thin rather than setting words more short and wide.  this backdrop is certainly more suited to portrait shooting.   If I was doing this in any professional capacity I would have certainly wanted the extra width even know it was relatively simple to Photoshop out the access it did add a few minutes to each edit.  This then obviously multiplied for each final product.  one thing that I certainly would do for next time wasn't sure that the bunting did not exit the frame as this caused the most amount of problems when trying to fill in the rest of the background I did not think about it at the time and in the pre shot I haven't had any half flags falling in and out of the backdrop I just had this to string which would have been edited but in the final shoot I had half flags on the border which took a lot of time to edit.

 

Now that I have a handle flat lighting scenarios I can now start experimenting with more dramatic lighting which I believe is needed to create my perception of atmospheric is. I think this will may be made easier once my studio has been completed as I have a much bigger space and more autonomy to be able to set things up leave them set up do testing learn from it and then change my setup.  the studio is taking a long time to build due to my work but at present I have no access to campus studios at family life means that I would be restricted in my ability to use them for extended periods anyway.  I have certainly enjoyed this shoot and the results that I have been able to make.  

The main thing to take away from this session is to get as much right in camera as possible. In this example my wife was the main client for the photographs and she wants to see a big range of options which then impacted in the post production workload normally I would just edit one picture which I thought the best but getting more right in camera means that I have more prepared close to final edits that I can then work on easily be able to output