Do you make wedding cakes? Do you deliver your cake to the wedding venue and set it up in place? What's your strategy for getting a good photograph of it before you leave? Do you just point-and-press or do you put a bit more thought into it?

There are lots of useful pointers I can give you which will help you to take better venue photographs (one of the bonus lessons in my upcoming photography course will tackle this subject in more detail), but today let me start you down the right road by getting you to think a little bit about what's behind your cake when you set it up, i.e. the backdrop.

You obviously have less control over your background at a venue than in your kitchen/studio but there are a couple of tips and tricks you can have up your sleeve. If the cake table is positioned in front of a beautiful backdrop you can jump for joy as you're on to a winner. Set your cake up, take your pictures and give yourself a pat on the back!

In the following example the background was plain white with fireplace and picture frame detail. The cake table was far enough away from the wall to allow the background to be blurred out (blurring is achieved by using the correct camera lens).

The difference can be like night and day, as demonstrated in the next example. The first image shows the cake set against a dark and uninteresting background. When I turned the cake around the backdrop was a curtain of warm fairy lights which decorated the opposite end of the hall. Because the lights were such a long distance away the blur created with my camera lens was fabulous!

(Note that the first picture was taken with my smartphone - not a great result, and more proof that a DSLR or mirrorless camera is the way to go).



The turning around trick works too if the backdrop is cluttered (for example there might be busy wallpaper which clashes with your cake). The aim of the game is to see your cake clearly against its backdrop - if the backdrop is too busy it'll fight for attention and your cake might get lost against it.

If your cake is massive (eg 5 tiers) it might be too difficult to turn it around so it's facing a different way and it might be safer just not to take the risk (please don't take any chances) but if it's a smaller cake it usually isn't a problem. If it's sitting on a tablecloth use the tablecloth to gently slide the cake around, if it's sitting on a stand which you can get a grip of or get your hands under (for example one with little feet) then carefully turn the stand. If your cake is very dainty (a single tier or two tiers) the world is your oyster and you can just pick it right up and place it in an altogether better part of the room to allow you to take a better picture of it.

Even if your background is a pretty one, it's still worth turning your cake around and taking a few pictures with it facing in a different direction. You might find you'll end up with two really nice shots. If you take photographs in your kitchen/studio before you deliver the cake (I'd 100% recommend doing this) then you'll have three! Lots to choose from for your social media posts.

One of the other things to pay attention to is windows. If your cake is sitting in front of a window and the sun is streaming directly in from behind you're likely to end up with either a super bright over-exposed background in your images or a cake that looks really dark. If the sun isn't streaming directly in the problem won't be quite so terrible, although there's still a high chance you'll end up with a dark looking cake.

Use the turning-around trick again here, even if it's just a little bit so that the light strikes the side of your cake instead of the back. If you don't have a choice and can only take the photograph from one direction, just make sure your cake is bright enough in the picture. You'll pay the price of an over-exposed background but that's better than a cake that's too dark.

Another fix would be to edit your image in a package such as Lightroom which will allow you to alter the exposure of your cake independent to its background so that the image looks more balanced.

The final thing we'll talk about is background blur, which we've mentioned a couple of times already. One of the best ways to make your cake stand out in an image is to separate it from its background. If you blur the background your image will immediately look softer and less busy, and your cake will be the focus of attention without any distractions. If you're looking to make a statement with your cake then this is a good way to do that. The technical name for background blur is 'bokeh' and it's achieved by using a camera lens with a wide aperture. Some smartphones do have a portrait mode, but this can be a bit hit or miss as it's created artificially - you'll get the best results using a proper camera (and they'll be controllable!). The more space you have between cake and background the better the result you'll get.

The first image in the following example was taken with my smartphone. The backdrop is grand and ornate, but it fights with the cake for attention. The second image shows the difference when I swap to my mirrorless camera and blur out the background. Suddenly the cake takes centre stage and is no longer competing with the wall behind it.

So there we are. A few tips and tricks to help you take better venue photographs. If you know someone else who might like to read please feel free to share! Keep your eyes peeled too for my upcoming cake photography course which will be running in February, make sure you've signed up to my newsletter if you'd like to hear about that. But until then have you downloaded my handy free guide which gives you 5 easy steps to help improve your cake images? Just click the button.