I decided to imitate her Red Currant and Poppy Seed cake photo. Check it out before reading ahead. Firstly, I could not find red currants in our local grocery store! So instead I took a similar recipe from My Baking Addiction - Fresh Strawberry bread.
I did not have the exact same props available in order to copy the original exactly. I had actually also gone out looking for these props to achieve an exact copy but was not successful in finding those items. I noticed that the bowl Aran used on the left had some light blue to it which complemented the background very well and allowed the foreground to tie into the background appropriately. I did not have this available to me, but instead had a plain white small bowl. I ended up tying a cream coloured string around the bowl, if not the white bowl on the white chopping board with the white cream cheese content would have caused a bit of an imbalance in my image (too much white) I feel. So i used this string as a bit of a distraction from that and to create a little more balance in colour. I have to admit though, it still did not achieve quite the same visual appeal.
I also substituted the rectangular loaf pan for a round cake pan. I think that in the original, the combination of differing shapes (rectangular baking pan and round bowl) provided a better contrast of shapes for the overall image.
I set up my subjects in front of a window to allow as much natural light to flow through. I also wanted to create some faint backlighting to match the original copy. I used an external flash with a diffuser and angled it above the subjects at a 45 degree angle from the left. This created too much shadow on my strawberries and too much shadow around the edges of the other props. Directing the light from right above caused the entire scene to be washed out. I therefore decided to put away my external flash. The natural light from the window still created slight unwanted shadows in my image, so I placed a mirror under the camera to direct some light onto the strawberries in order to reduce this shadowing effect as much as possible. My copy still had more shadow present than the original, and I think without shadows at all, it provides a much softer look, which is achieved in the original.
I used an aperture setting of f/ 5.6 in my photo, in order to allow most of the foreground to come in focus. However I noticed then that in the original, the pieces of cake in her pan were slightly out of focus so i used the Gaussian blur filter in photoshop to create this effect in my image. Something i should have taken note of earlier on!
I used a focal length of 55mm (on a 1.6x crop frame so around 88mm). I was not able to use a focal length smaller than this as my background was a lot smaller than Aran's and therefore a smaller focal length would have meant that the background would not have filled up the entire frame.
This assignment was a great experience and it definitely won't be the last time I use this method as a way of building up my food photography skills and techniques.. now i await my grade.
