Week 23 – Party
This is probably my least favorite shot in the ones I’ve created for the 52 week project so far. It’s a classic case of settling for, “good enough.” As always, I felt pressed for time and I thought I could achieve the shot I wanted pretty quickly. As it turned out, the dynamic cupcake shot against a washed out background turned out to be a a mix of beige “blah” against a grey-ish background. Not so appetizing.
So what went wrong? Lots of things, but here’s just a few:
I picked the wrong cupcake.
While this is a tasty looking and visually appealing cupcake from Sublime Cupcakes (who have excellent, and ironically more “my” style shots on their web site), it didn’t provide that colorful contrast I was looking for against a white background. I should have scrapped my original idea (high key cupcake) and changed my background to create more color contrasts against the earth tones of the cupcake and maybe even switched to a natural light setup to compliment the subject more. Ultimately though, I think I should have picked a cupcake that would have popped more, not the one I was most interested in eating!
I picked the wrong candle.
White candle, white-ish background. Genius. In truth, we didn’t have any other kind of birthday candles in the house, so I settled. Settling makes for average photos. Don’t settle, keep pushing to make it better.
I should have worked the lighting more.
As it stands, the lighting is pretty flat, and not providing a lot of interest with shadows, etc. Also, I gave up on lighting the background to wash it out. The cupcake was so close to the paper roll I had rigged up that it was hard to light the cupcake and the background separately without light spilling into one another so I gave up on trying to make the paper all white.
The morale of the story is, if you want an exceptional shot and not just a blah one, keep working your shot until it’s not just good enough, but it’s the exact shot you want. If you have sufficient willpower, that cupcake’s not going anywhere, it doesn’t mind if you take a little extra time to get it right.
This is an entry for a 52 week photo project I’m participating in conjuction with several other members of the Lancaster County Photography Meetup Group. I’ll be posting the entries here with either an anecdote, challenges in creating the shot, successes, or frustrations with my week to week results.
- You can find out more about the project and see other participant’s photos here:
www.flickr.com/groups/lancaster-52-project - You can see my entries in the project as a set here:
www.flickr.com/photos/ranzino/sets/72157628691366537
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