More Great Light

I am currently in the process of post-processing wedding photos from earlier this year in preparation for putting together a photo album, and came across a picture of the wedding cake that is just fantastic. This is such a big deal for me, because I rarely shoot pictures that I would classify as "fantastic". And lest you think I am simply blowing my own horn here, I had at least two other people say they thought it was fantastic as well :) No, really, I did!

The challenge for me was to figure out *why* the picture looked as good as it did. I knew it was a quality of light issue, but thought there was more to it. In the end, I enlisted the help of other photographers in the SmugMug forum (known as Digital Grin), and got their input as well.

The more I learn about photography, the more I learn how important light really is - especially in showing "depth".

There is this type of light known as "flat lighting", which means (as you can probably guess) that there is equal light coming from all sides of the subject. The result of this is that the subject looks very flat - as opposed to 3D. If you are a novice at photography, then you might not even know this is what is going on. All you can probably tell is that the photograph doesn't look as good as you would like it to. This is *exactly* the type of light you get from direct, on-camera flash, by the way. This is why it is *always* a good idea (when using flash) to either take the flash off-camera, or to bounce it off a wall to your left or right, which essentially takes that flash off camera (along with making it much softer).

Here is the photo in question:



Notice a couple of things about the lighting here:

1) There are absolutely no harsh shadows - the light is very "soft". Some of the light is coming from ambient light streaming through windows into the room, which helps to give the warm look to the photo.
2) The left of the entire cake and tablecloth is brighter than the right (there is a shadow on the right). This helps to give "depth" to the photo, and was accomplished by bouncing my flash off the wall to my left. In this case, since the color of the wall was very close to the color of the cake and tablecloth, there was no color cast to get rid of in post-processing.
3) There is a highlight on the right side of the cake that is most noticeable on the bottom tier. I am unsure of the source of this light (sorry, I didn't plan it that way :) ).
4) In addition to the lighting of the cake, the cake itself is just gorgeous, the room is very formal and there is really nothing distracting in the background. Also, the placement of the napkin, plates, and bouquet is very natural looking (no, I didn't place them there).

All in all, it has been a fun study of a "lucky" shot I got more than 3 months ago, and has inspired me to start looking more for these lighting scenarios when I am actually taking the picture.

-- Brian