You're a cake maker and you take photographs of your cakes. You have a smartphone on your person 99.9% of the time so it's a no-brainer to use your phone to take your cake photographs with before you share them with the world. Right?

But have you ever wondered if there's a better way? A way you can improve those images you're getting and take them up a notch. Wouldn't it be good in this saturated world of a million scrolling images to make your own stand out from the crowd and portray a more professional image of yourself and your work. The answer is a simple one, and it's a DSLR (or mirrorless) camera. If you were to twist my arm and ask me to name just 5 reasons why you should make the switch here's what I'd tell you.

1) Low Light Performance

As cake makers the majority of photographs we take are indoors, often in poor light, so it stands to reason we'd be interested in the low light performance of whichever camera we use. One of the biggest factors which affects low light performance is camera sensor size. The sensor is the part behind the lens which captures light and converts it into a digital signal. The bigger the sensor, the more light it can capture, the better its performance. Even the very best smartphones just don't have the physical space to fit in a sensor big enough to match that of a DSLR or mirrorless camera, so they'll never be as good in low light situations.

Today is a dull rainy day. Here's a comparison of how my iPhone 13 compares to my Sony camera when I take a picture in my kitchen.

3) Beautiful Background Blur

Many smartphones have a Portrait mode which will artificially blur out your background. This can be a bit hit or miss as you just select the mode, cross your fingers and see what happens. Sometimes cake details might become distorted (in the first iPhone 13 example picture above you'll see part of the tallest flower stem is missing for this reason), and the overall image still ends up looking a bit harsh. With a DSLR, again because you can select which lens you use, you can properly control depth of field (the amount of your image that's either in focus or nicely blurred).

4) Lens Distortion

One of our biggest goals as cake makers is to show off to the world how straight the sides of our cakes are. Smartphones are not our friends when it comes to straight lines in an image, a lot of the time the lines get distorted. How annoying when you're trying to sell your 'best self' to future clients and customers. With the correct lens on a DSLR/mirrorless camera (back to lenses again!) this problem disappears.

Let me demonstrate in a couple of different ways. Firstly, let's look at a single tier. Can you see in the iPhone image how wide the top looks compared with the bottom? Yikes! In real life my cake didn't look like this! Look at the difference between this image and a similar one I took with my DSLR.

Let's look now at a tiered cake. Can you see in the smartphone image that the top tiers look like they're bending backwards while the bottom tiers, cake board and cake stand are tipping forwards? Everything is distorted. Compare this to my mirrorless camera image which has all the lines as they should be. Much better!

Often you'll be aware that there's something not quite right with the photograph but you can't put your finger on just exactly what. A lot of the time it's this!

5) External Flash

When I talk about flash I don't mean the kind that's built in to your phone or camera, I'm talking about external/remote flash which can be moved around the room as you're taking pictures with your DSLR. External flash is a secret weapon of awesomeness, it allows you to control how light strikes your cake and opens up a world of creative possibilities. It gives depth and contrast and will set your images apart.

From online sources it seems possible to use external flash with a smartphone, however the other smartphone issues would still be there, so you'd have to ask yourself would the end result be worth the investment. For a DSLR or mirrorless camera however, using external flash adds an extra dimension to your images.

So there you have it. My 5 top reasons why a DSLR or mirrorless camera will outperform a smartphone.

If you use a smartphone for your cake photographs and are happy with the results then brilliant! But if there's a little part of you that knows there's a better way to do it which will set you apart from the crowd and elevate your cake photography game then let me plant this seed of a DSLR (or mirrorless) camera. You will never look back!

If you'd like to learn more about cake photography I've created a handy free guide which gives you 5 easy steps to help improve your images, no matter whether you use a smartphone or a DSLR.