February 2016 – mikecassellphoto

A first for me. I was recently asked to do shot a little girls, Ruby, first birthday cake smash. After a quick think, I thought, why not, something different and it helps to broaden the portfolio and get the creative juices flowing.

First step was to do some research on the net, YouTube was a great place, lots of helpful videos, particularly when it came to backdrops. I soon realised that my material backdrop would not be very practical, so off to the local stockist for a paper background. All the information on line suggested going for a bright yellow, which I thought why not, keep it bright and not glitzy. There came the first issue, the car friendly lengths of 2 meters do not come in yellow, so a 3 meter roll was purchased, after I had checked that it would fit in the car, the staff at the Flash Centre in Birmingham were very helpful, with the back seats dropped and wedged into the front passenger well. All was OK.

So on the day of the shoot, I loaded up the car, with backdrop filling up most of the space and just had room to get the camera, flash heads, lighting stands and the backdrop stands. There was just space to get myself in the drivers seat and away…..

Setting up was straight forward and I decided to only use one flash head with a soft-box on it, keeping the light fairly low.

Got the images first of the cake on its own, all intact and Ruby, before the carnage started.

Now came the fun, Ruby , at first was not the slightest bit interested on smashing the cake, but kept walking around it and coming up to me to look into the lens. After some encouragement, she soon got the hand of it and started the smash in earnest. Only issue was that now with gooey cake on her fingers she was trying to share it with me, and the camera lens. Not a good result but being quick on my feet, I managed to avoid any sticky mishaps.

At the best part of all, using the paper background left the clean up very quick, cut if off, fold it up and dispose of in the rubbish bin, great.

All in all, not a bad way to spend a few hours, will certainly do it again and the research on the web paid off.

I have put a few images form the day in the post and hope that if anybody reads the post they enjoy them, I did……

And if anybody is wondering this was how the cake looked when we had finished…..Tip,if doing this, get a cheap cake…

With the weather being absolutely awful the UK, not much chance to get out of a weekend, whether photography related or just for a walk in the countryside, it was time to get the old photo mags out and have a look to see what I could do at home with minimal kit.

After looking through them i chanced across an article where they were taking images of a bowl of smarties using glycerine,a macro lens, piece of glass, tripod and a desk lamp.

Great, got all of these except the smarties, but a quick trip to the local supermarket and a bag of M&M’s where in the basked through the checkout and back home in no time at all.

The set-up was quite straight forward, the tricky pats was making sure that the glass was absolutely clean with no grease stains, finer marks, stray hairs were present.Any of these needed to be cleaned off.

After that it was just setting up the bowl with the M&M’s on the table, the sheet of glass above it, supported on each side by a few books. then drops of glycerine on the glass and then set the camera up on a tripod with the desk lamp positioned off to side. Then, just started playing with how close to put the camera, how many drops ro put on and changing the focal point, aperture and speed to suit.

It was a great way to spend a few hours, better than getting wet, got some great images, and the best bit, got bowl of M&M’s to eat when everything was tided up.

Well worth doing, and i will be doing this again trying out different props, ant mixing them up, maybe jellie babies and liquorice allsorts.

Month: February 2016

An afternoon with……Ruby

An evening with…. A bowl of M&M’s