Day 11 - Chocolate Banana Cupcakes

Banana cupcakes with a chocolate topping

Photographer's notes:

I knew I wanted an even yellow background so I headed for the yellow tiles in our kitchen. To knock out the bench I put the cupcake on top of a white ramekin. I shot reasonably close with my 24-70mm lens at 70mm and an f-stop of 4 - just enough to keep the cupcake in focus while allow the background to blur out. To get the even lighting I cranked the shutter speed to ~150, dropped the iso to 100 and relied on the flash (bounced off the white ceiling) to do it's ttl magic. After a few variations I peeled the cupcake casing down to hide the white ramekin and mimic a banana peel. After a few quick touch ups we ended up with the image above. 

Day 10 - Chocolate Cupcake

Chocolate cupcake

Photographer's notes - I wanted to go for something soft, classical, and old looking to help compliment this basic (compared to the rest of what wifey has been up to) cupcake recipe. This was just a chocolate cupcake, no extras. I settled on ambient light (in this case tungsten house lights providing even lighting through the room) and the piano to match the simple, brown colour palette and also for a bit of a classical feel.

I came up with the above 2 candidates. While they were taken with a slow shutter at an iso of 100 (so very clean noise wise) when I got them into lightroom I decided to add some grain to help enhance that old, classical feeling. This is the first image that I have wanted to add grain to and I feel that it really helps sell the story of the image in this case.

Day 9 - Chocolate and Peanut Butter Cupcakes

Chocolate and Peanut butter cupcakes

Photographer's notes - This photo took a while to come right. I knew I wanted a golden background and I knew I wanted peanut butter in the shot. The bit that took a while was getting the right balance of flash vs ambient light to make the normally yellow and white background take on a golden appearance compared to the background (the ambient light was tungsten so should be orange, the main light was an external flash coming in at about 45 degrees behind and to the left of the camera.)

In the end the messy, spiky glob of peanut butter was the winner out of a bunch of earlier, smoother candidates and the wooden chopping board benefited from the addition of olive oil to help bring out the golden colour.

Day 8 - Chocolate and Raspberry Cupcakes

Raspberry and Chocolate cupcakes were on the agenda today. They had a lovely pink icing and ribena was included in the recipe.

Photographer's Notes: This was another reaosnably accidental photo. I had intended to use a red ramekin, fill it with raspberries, and place the cupcake on top. In the process of doing this I grabbed a glass to help me sort through the raspberries. I felt that the glass was more effective and the rest of the above idea took shape.

This image also includes a little bit of photoshopping. As it turned out the chocolate ended up with a strange green and yellow tinge to it. I had to darken it up and shift the colour slightly to get it looking right.

Day 7 - Cinnamon Cupcakes

Cinnamon Cupcakes ended the first week of the 100 day cupcake challenge. They smell amazing and have a layered structure that is visible through the base of the cupcake in the photo above.

Photographers Notes:

This is a composite of 2 images. The first was taken before I made a massive mistake. The second image was taken after the massive mistake. I wanted a gradient going from a nice warm orange at the bottom of the image to black at the top of the image. I wanted to achieve this by using a flash to light the foreground and letting the background drop off to nothing. The warmth would be achieved through using our dining room table which has goldy coloured imitation wood. This all worked quite well in the first image. While that did look warm and inviting I decided I wanted to add some cinnamon to the shot. I figure I would sprinkle it through a sieve to create golden droplets against the black background. While this worked, and is included in the final image. I hadn't counted on how fine the cinnamon was and how quickly it would fall through the sieve. The consequence of that mistake was a table and cupcake drenched in cinnamon. While the cinnamon on the table and in the air looked quite nice the top of the cupcake was now solid cinnamon. It looked horrible. Luckily by this stage my positions were locked though so I was able to combined the top of the cupcake from the previous shot with the rest of the second image. The result it above.

Day 6 - Vanilla (ice) Cupcakes

Vanilla Cupcakes with icing (different to vanilla ice)

Photographers Notes: To be perfectly honest I don't really get vanilla. When I hear vanilla mentioned I immediately expect to hear ice or ice-cream following it. Jess tells me that it's about subtlety, perhaps someone should have told vanilla ice that. In any case I opted for something plain and subtle. Whiteness. I was a bit tired of plates so this time around I inverted a rameken to make a white platform for the cupcake to sit on top of. I bounced the flash off the ceiling to create some nice, even, bright white light. I also opted for a relatively large F number to help ensure everything was in focus. I added the vanilla pod because I wanted something that said vanilla without whispering ice ice baby at the end.

Day 5 - Queen Cupcakes

Here we have a Queen Cupcake - a hyrbid of the batter from Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess with the sultana concept from the Edmond's cookbook. It's the Nigella's cupcake recipe with some sultanas added. It looks like a scone but tastes sweeter.

Photographer's notes:
I wanted to go for a very English tea set-up. While Jess does have a suitable tea set I was horrified to learn that we didn't have any doilies. I also couldn't find a tea tray. I started out with 3 whole cupcakes on a saucer with the teapot and tea cup in the background. This looked far too busy and didn't actually show any of the sultanas. After a few attempts I cut the cupcake in half, added a sultana, and ditched the saucer.Things were starting to look good. With a bit more tweaking I managed to get some steam in the tea cup. This was achieved through pouring boiling water into the tea cup and using an external flash to backlight the steam as it rose out of the teacup. The finished product is a combination of 2 exposures. The dominant exposure is lit by the house lights and provides everything except the steam. The secondary exposure is the steam alone illuminated by the external flash. Everything else in the secondary exposure was well underlit to the point of appearing black. This made life easy in photoshop as the black ended up acting as an alpha channel leaving only the steam. In the end I was glad that we didn't have a doily or a tea tray, they would have added more unnecessary clutter and lead to a lot more mucking around.

Day 4 - Butterfly Cupcakes

Here we have a butterfly cupcake topped with cream, jam, and icing sugar.

Photographer's notes:
When Jess initially talked about butterfly cupcakes my immediate instinct was to throw them in the air and catch a photo of them mid flight against a blue sky. While this may have been good for a giggle I was told that this would not do as the cream and icing sugar would not hold up until morning. Instead I grabbed a dainty, flowery plate and positioned the cupcake on it. Jess repositioned it to show off its best angle and I suggested we replace one of the wings. Photoshop wise the jam has been brightened slightly and the recorded colour of the cream has been toned down (it came out very yellow which seems to be a common problem when photographing whipped cream).

Day 3 - Liquorice Allsort Cupcakes

Liquorice Allsorts Cupcakes set against our most allsorty cushion.

Photographers notes:
I'm not a Liquorice Allsorts fan myself so I don't really get these lollies. That being said they seem to be about colour and have that iconic black liquorice strip running through them. I put the remaining allsorts on a plate around Jess's sample cupcake - I liked the wedge that she had taken out of it. I grabbed a coloured cushion with a striped section running through it and put it in the background. I figured it was allsorts-y looking. While I did play with the cushiion a bit in photoshop afterwards to try and make it more allsortsy eventually I settled on the original image which is what you see here.

Day 2 - Orange Zest Cupcakes

Day 2 is the first opporunity to branch out, in this case literally.


Photographers notes:
Today things got a little more elaborate. While we don't have an orange tree we do have a mandarin tree. I figured that if I kept things out of focus nobody would be able to tell the difference. While that did work reasonably well the next set of cupcakes required a trip to the supermarket. Seeing as I was there I picked up a few oranges and reshot the image. This is the pick of the bunch.

Day 1 - Plain Cupcakes

When starting a 100 day project it makes sense to start at the beginning. In this case the beginning is aplain cupcake - the recipe taken straight out of the Edmond's Cookbook (a.k.a. 'Old Faithful')

These are the cupcakes that I grew up with so they brough back loads of memories from when I was a kid. Admittedly most of those involved sneaking jsut one more cupcake while nobody was looking... 

Photographers notes:

I kept things simple for this one. They are plain cupcakes afterall. I had a look at the light falling around the cupcakes and decided that I liked this angle best.