Cake!

I’ve never been to a wedding that didn’t have some kind of edible centrepiece. Usually it’s a cake, but these days stacks of exotic cheeses are fashionable too. Most wedding cakes aren’t as amazing as the ones self-proclaimed “Food Porn Goddess Extraordinaire” Jennifer makes and blogs about at jintrinsique so it can be difficult to come up with an interesting way to shoot them. And shoot them you must, because the cake is the opposite of the marriage: it is the duty of the guests to see that it lasts as little time as possible; someone has to make a record of it.

Not being a technical, landscape, or architectural photographer I have less practice with inanimate objects; for me, the Problem Of The Wedding Cake is an extension of the Problem Of The Static Subject. It:

• doesn’t move,
• doesn’t have or express emotions, and
• doesn’t interact with other objects

so you have to do these things for it. You can move on behalf of the Static Subject, for example by shooting it from an odd angle. You can fake emotion, for example by shooting the Static Subject in light that suggests a particular mood. You can photograph a Non-Static Subject or two (the bride and groom) interacting with the the Static Subject. This is of course the classic “cutting of the cake” shot—and it’s a bitch.

First of all, no matter what you do, the shot will be corny. Second, it is inevitable that this ceremony will happen later in the day, indoors, and away from a window so you will probably have to use flash. To make this worse, the knife-wielding couple will be stuck in a corner against a pale background and you will have to navigate around tens of snap-happy wedding guests all going for the same shot. You can get as fancy as you like with your diffusers and reflectors and bouncers, but in the absence of your own lighting crew, there will be unwanted harsh shadows; your job is to keep them out of frame—an off-camera flash can help with this. Third, you won’t get many shots of the actual cutting. The punters will get under your feet or in the frame and—no matter how much you want to tell them to get lost and no matter how nasty you are off duty—you are being paid to be nice. The bride and groom will very quickly either mark the cake irreversibly or get bored.

If anyone has any advice on how to deal with the wedding cake challenge I would be happy to read it, but here are my main tips:

• Make sure you are the first there when the cake is put on display at the reception venue and try to get some shots of it under natural light. If necessary remove distracting background objects and ask the catering staff to arrange it in the most photogenic way possible—perhaps even asking if the table can be moved nearer to a useful source of light.
• Find out from the couple when the cutting will take place and try to be the first person on the scene.
• Take advantage of the cake’s immobility. Sure, a Static Subject can be boring but you can set up a tripod in front of it without missing the shot and (even handheld) use slower shutter speeds—indeed you can experiment with a long exposure and capture blurs of movement around it.
• Make sure that you are there just before the cake gets taken away to be cut into pieces. Everyone else with a camera will have lost interest by then, you’ll get an inside view of the cake, and it’s just a smidgen more interesting than pictures of a smiling husband and wife slicing the icing.