Strobed cake

Go ahead, take a gander at the pic to the right. Click it, look at it up close. This is one of my favorite (recent) pics – taken just last week on the fly.  Since posting it on Flickr, I’ve had a few people asking about the details.  Perhaps better said: they wanted to know how I did it.

First off, this is a single-strobe shot. The background was brighter than the foreground, so that’s my primary area of exposure concern.  This means taking a reading on one of the brighter areas with a spot meter.  In my case, the in-camera one – no prob.

Now, dial it down a little, to bring in the saturation of the colors.  End result: before I’ve taken the shot, I’ve already set the camera in manual at 1/100th, f/ 9.

This makes the foreground far to dark.  So quick, set the on-camera flash to commander mode, yank of the large flash, set it to sync mode, and hand it to someone nearby (thanks, Josh!).  Set that to 50mm (limit the spread of the light), and have him hold it up near the ceiling.

At this point we have a remote flash, the background exposed properly, and a nearby diffuser to blast light off of (the ceiling).  Set the external flash to iTTL, with “0″ compensation across.

We’re set, now let’s go: give it the first test shot.  As expected, it was too dark. This is mostly due to the light color of the cake and the bright background.  Dialed it up to +.7ev on the flash and took try #2.  Dead on – we’re good.  All shots from that point on were like that.

Flash is barely three feet to camera left for this.  Remember that this is while people are milling about and setting up wedding decorations.  It’s a great effect in little time.