French Toast and Bacon Cupcakes
This past Sunday I took a DIY Food Photography class at Brooklyn Brainery, a ‘trade school’ that offers cheap, informative classes on pretty much anything you can imagine. In addition to DIY Food Photography, this month they also offered classes on Knot Tying, WordPress and Intro to Urban Forestry, among others.
We were instructed to bring a piece of fruit or a vegetable to photograph, or, if we were feeling more adventurous, something a little more complex. I figured that since I’ve a baking blog, I should probably take a baked good. And what would be a good, complex thing to photograph that wouldn’t take hours to create?
The answer came in the form of The Busty Baker’s French Toast and Bacon Cupcakes, cupcakes which blew me away the first time I saw them back at CupcakeCampColumbus 1.0. They were delicious and a sight to behold, with a little crowning piece of bacon on top.
So I whipped up a batch. The most difficult part of this cupcake (besides realizing I was out of piping bags and wasting half a batch of frosting trying to use a piping tip in a Ziploc bag) was cooking the bacon. I’m a skillet girl myself, but I wanted my pieces of bacon to be as flat as possible, so I went the microwave route. The first round of microwaved bacon got burnt black and left my entire apartment smelling like a pig in an incinerator. I finally got a handle on the cooking times and turned out some lovely pieces of bacon.
They certainly were a talking point at the class. Everyone else brought fruit or vegetables, which are very pretty, but come on. How often do you just NEED to photograph an onion? I am of the opinion that most of the people in that class will find themselves documenting full dishes than just the ingredients.
The class was great and I learned some very important things about my camera’s setting and how to use Photoshop to manipulate photos. I also learned that if I really want to get serious in photographing my food, I need to buy another lens. Isn’t that always the way?
Update: You can read another blog post about this event at Julia C. Smith‘s blog. Check out her pretty radish photos!
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4 thoughts on “French Toast and Bacon Cupcakes”
So pretty!! I’d love to take a food photo class. Or really just figure out how to use the crappy lightning in my apartment. That’s my biggest problem. I did finally break down and attempt photo editing recently, though. But alas, no fancy camera and no Photoshop, so my pictures will continue to suck for awhile.
Do you have a manual setting on your point and shoot? If so, set your ISO to 400 and your f stop to pretty much as low as it’ll go. Then if you can adjust your shutter speed, go no lower than 1/30. That’s basically what I learned as far as the camera settings go.
Yeah, the lighting in my apartment is craptastic. I’ve decided to set up a little studio in the front room where we get the most light. I’m going to drag my filing cabinet over to the window and get some butcher paper to tape to the window and then drape down over the top of the filing cabinet. That gives you the ‘seamless paper’ look for white backgrounds.
Also, there’s free editing software called Picnic that the instructor of my class really likes. You can play with levels and saturation there!
Oh, also, if you have a macro setting, you can use that too.
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