Wedding Cake

[Morto]

This is my first time taking wedding pictures with my 40D.
I did some edit in photoshop. Please CC

[Nimitz87]

take this with a grain of salt as I know very little...but to me there is to much going on in the photo. the glimmer off the glass, and the fork are distracting if the cake is the center piece...I find myself looking at the fork, and the blue line more than the cake.

Chad

[adam8080]

Take off the fake flairs. They are way too distracting. The angle you shot the cake at makes the cake look tiny. It looks to be a tiny bit bigger than the small plate. The whole picture looks soft too, but it looks as if you were going for that effect.

If it were me, I'd fix the white balance, bump up the saturation a bit and give it a little more contrast with a hint of vignetting. Try to make the cake look like you want to eat it, not like a runway model.

[adam8080]

Also, next time this would go in the Wedding Photo Sharing forums.

And Welcome to POTN!

[Morto]

Thank you for the comments. I will play around with the effects a little more.
I do appreciate your comments very much. I will post more once I get this better.
Thank you!

[Nimitz87]

Thank you for the comments. I will play around with the effects a little more.
I do appreciate your comments very much. I will post more once I get this better.
Thank you!

I think you tried to do "to much at once"

like the other guy said take away the flairs, and it won't be so "busy", I bet that itself will help quite a bit.

Chad

[picturecrazy]

It's a cool cake... but I'm looking at this picture and I have no idea what is in focus...
The whites also way too bright.

[tim]

It's too bright. It's too busy. It's taken with a wide angle which distorts things in a bad way. The lighting's flat (aka boring).

Solution:
- Use a longer lens
- Move distracting objects away from the cake.
- Watch your histogram
- Bounce the light off a wall (or off anything light colored, like someone wearing a white shirt. I'm not kidding). You don't want the dark side more than a stop or two below the side the light is on, too much contrast is a bad thing in this case.

Cake shots can be boring. It's a cake. It doesn't move. Get up high. Get down low. Consider an angle. Take a look at the cake shot on my blog (http://www.wildphotography.co.nz/blog/?p=53) (it's a big post, it's down a bit). I have a standard set of cake shots:
- Whole cake, camera position middle of the cake. This is the safe shot. Take a few.
- Half the cake, with the head table or guests in the background
- Half the cake, with a plain background
- From directly above (taking in the knife etc)
- On an angle (see blog)

This takes 20 seconds, but typically I take it while the guests are having dinner (I eat quickly) so I have plenty of time. Lately i've been using off camera strobes, but since the images won't be printed large just meter the ambient, set your exposure for 1 stop below ambient, and use flash to light the rest of the cake.

[Morto]

Thank you everyone. Thank you for your time and honest opinions looking through my picture. I will learn from my mistakes to take better pictures next time.

[SuzyView]

You guys need to report these so I can move them to SHARE. :)

It looks too bright and busy to me, even before I read the posts here. I think if you took down the brightness, it still would not fix to our of focus issue, though.

[_aravena]

Too bright and too fuzzy. Way too much soft focus on this along with flares being a bit much. There can be a balance but of course to each their own.

[bigcountry]

at first i thought it was the death star and i was in the middle of star wars.

[Tawcan]

It's a bit too bright and fuzzy. Don't really like the flares personally. There's seems to be quite a bit going on in the pic, not sure where my eyes should go.

[brit84]

bright, perhaps overexposed a little, looks soft or oof, lots going on as others pointed out