iPhone Photography for the Profoundly Lazy

and a few brief updates

A few quick updates from Bayou Saint Cake!

Orders for November will open on Wednesday, October 25th. I’ll shoot all y’all subscribers a message that morning with a link to order early for November dates - except for Thanksgiving, you’ll see a special menu for that a bit later.

I made the call not to open books for weddings next year and I feel fantastic about it. I have a list of topics I’d like to cover for this newsletter that grows longer each day, and I’m excited to give myself a little more wiggle room to write. 

I don’t have much more to cover here as I’ve been frantically packing for my honeymoon all day, so here’s a brief, hot tip on how I take pictures for Instagram.

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I don’t take pictures of my cakes for social media on a fancy camera - I don’t have the time, inclination, or technical skill. And honestly, I think a relatively up-to-date iPhone is perfectly fine for the job. 

One thing I’ve learned over the years is to not overthink iPhone food photography. Whether you’re a pro or just taking pics for fun at home, you only really need two things: gently diffused natural light and a somewhat neutral background. For years, I took pictures of nearly all my cakes on an old tablecloth I’d dyed in an indigo vat and allowed to fade. I’d drape it on on two full sheet trays leaning against a wall, and open a nearby door to an alleyway to let some light in from the right.

You really can’t tell that these were taken in a commercial dish pit, right?

These days, I’m lucky to have a corner of my kitchen that faces a window made of glass blocks, which does a great job of making my natural light a little more fuzzy and gentle (not the technical terms, but again, I’m not a pro photographer!).

I only give myself about a minute to shoot each cake (you won’t really get better pictures with more time, just more pictures to wade through later that all look exactly alike). I try to take pics at two angles - one three-quarter view, and one directly overhead. Sometimes I’ll zoom in on a fun detail for a close-up. 

Later, I edit the photos in the Instagram app itself (once again, no time to fuss around with fancy photo editing apps - the longer it takes for me to post something, the less likely I’ll actually get around to it).

I think folks are more attracted to only very gently edited images, so I don’t tweak them very much - I just turn up the saturation by 10% and the structure by 8-10%. I don’t actually even really know what structure means, but something about turning it up makes the pics look fancier - a food photographer once told me so! Sometimes I’ll crop the images so that the cake fits a little tighter in the frame. I always post in portrait view - rumor has it you get more engagement in that mode because the eye lingers on it a hair longer. Is that true? Who knows!

Here’s an original, unedited picture:

And here’s my edited version with the patented BSC formula:

That’s it! 

See you in a few weeks!

Bronwen