September 29, 2009 - Deliciously disgusting cake

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f5.6

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RAW

I'll admit up front, this isn't going to be easy to explain. That thing on the table is a cake. It is also supposed to be meatloaf. But in actuality, it's really supposed to be a monster's foot. Make sense?

Don't worry, it didn't make sense at first to me either.

Here's the explanation. I work as a programmer at HowStuffWorks.com, and we just launched the TLC Cooking portion of our website (which you can find at recipes.howstuffworks.com). Being in a celebratory mood, the folks at TLC headquarters wanted to send us us a large cake for everyone to eat. But they didn't want to send just a plain cake — oh no, that just wouldn't be fun enough. They wanted to send a special cake that would look like one of the dishes from the recipes on the new site. But what recipe did they pick? One from the Halloween section called Feet of Meat!

So in honor of our accomplishment, we got to eat cake that was meant to look like a cooked foot of some Halloween monster. How appetizing.

In today's shot, our editor in chief, Conal Byrne, had just cut off the first piece of cake (for those wondering, it was the big toe), revealing to everyone that the cake was red velvet, creating a great illusion of raw meat inside. Everyone either laughed, gasped, or gagged. But what would you expect? Even those on the other side of the cake (who couldn't see the red inside) still saw the blood red cake stuck to the knife as he pulled it out of the cake. Yum, nothing like simulated red meat!

I took this photo just at the height of everyone's reaction. I like the candid emotions and reactions caught on their faces. It was a prime moment, and it can be hard to catch these kind of reactions. If I wasn't ready with the camera when the moment happened, I would have never caught it. Of course, it helped that I knew the cake was red velvet and I was expecting a good reaction. A little planning and anticipation can go a long way in getting great photos.

I used my dedicated flash and bounced it off of the ceiling to get a nice even amount of lighting in the whole room. This technique also eliminates the vast majority of shadows in the room, which helps add to the overall effect of the photo.

I purposely cropped it very wide to eliminate all of the dead space in the upper and lower portion of the photo. This helped draw attention to the most important parts of the photo, the cake and everyone's reaction to it. I just wish it wasn't so dark in the back corner. Maybe I should have had my flash pointing a little more forward instead of just straight up.