First Birthday Cake Smash !

I always enjoy the cake smash sessions in the studio ! It may get a bit messy (well, very messy….) but it is good fun and leaves the studio smelling of chocolate for the rest of the day 🙂

I’ve been posting a few photographs recently to show how we use the kit that we do. I’m a great believer in keeping things uncomplicated and making sure you know exactly what each light you are using is doing. It is very easy when you are new to photography to read up online and think that you need to light evrery portrait session with at least five lights but you don’t. what you do need to so is understand WHAT each light is doing and WHY you are using it. You will also find that the lighting setups will vary according to the colour of the walls round you; in our studio we have light coloured walls so we get a lot of reflected light. If I don’t want this I need to use black “reflectors” and backdrops to stop it; these absorb the light rather than reflecting it back…

Anyway, back to our cake smash session… I used a vinyl backdrop supported by my favourite Manfrotto extendable pole and two Manfrotto lighting stands. I also tied some bunting across the back…. The floor is a printed vinyl floor (easily washable with no floorboard cracks for cake crumbs to hide down) and this is taped down with Duck Tape to make sure it doesn’t move and is less of a trip hazard. The lighting is provided from my Elinchrom Quadra’s through a large Lastolite Ezybox II Octa fitted with its double baffles.

For this session I used my Canon 24-70 f2.8 lens on the Canon 5dMk3. I manually metered the light and set the camera to ISO 100 1/160 sec f4.0 with flash white balance.

So, these are the “before” and “after” setup shots (taken without flash) and a couple of the photographs from the session 🙂