powdered sugar and doughnuts

Mmmm Chocolate and Doughnuts….

First off, I just wanted to apologize for the lack to posts recently on Taylor Takes a Taste. I have been posting plenty on Taylor Tailgates (if you haven’t seen it yet it is the new home for college football tailgating! ) so I have gotten behind on Taylor Takes a Taste. Also, thank you for the notices about not being able to see the comments on the site. I am not sure how it happened, but I can receive your comments on the WP admin side and can approve them, but I have no idea why they are only showing up as lines. If this has ever happened to you, I would love to know how you fixed it. I am working on trying to figure out a solution.

Anyway, time for another photo technique post. Today’s post involves how to take pictures of “action shots” when you are working alone. While at the grocery store yesterday, I saw a box of assorted doughnuts. There were 4 different varieties all with different looks. Naturally, I couldn’t help to think of all the different ways to shoot them! I walked back and forth a few times before deciding to purchase them. The next couple of posts will have these doughnuts as the subjects.

First up, Chocolate. While they look delicious as just chocolate, I though that they needed something more. On a side note, the chocolate glaze on the doughnuts was hard and dull when I bought them, I brushed on a little bit of vegetable oil to the surface to bring back that shine. This shine makes the chocolate look like it had just been poured on top and ready for the missing ingredient. What is the missing ingredient you ask? Well it is…..

Powdered Sugar! I chose powdered sugar for a few reasons. 1. I didn’t have sprinkles (you could use them as well) 2. Powdered sugar is something you would garnish doughnuts with, so it makes sense. Remember to always have your props make sense in an image and 3. The white sugar looks really pretty on top of the chocolate doughnut.

So now the challenging part. How to I get an image of the powdered sugar falling onto the doughnuts when I am shooting alone? I am sure many of you do a lot of your shooting alone and wish you had a third hand to trigger the camera as you were using your hands in the shot. Well let me introduce you to a third hand.

Yes it is a remote, but this remote is locked in the rapid fire position. While many remotes differ, most have a setting where you can lock the trigger so it will continuously fire. Why would I do this you ask?

Well for several reasons. First, I need 2 hands to shake the powdered sugar out of the sifter onto the doughnuts, so having the camera continuously fire will allow me to use two hands to shake the sugar. Second, having the camera continuously fire at a rapid rate will allow me to have a lot of options to choose from of the sugar falling. I took 85 pictures in a row while I was shaking the sugar. Above are a few of them. When having your camera continuously fire like this, you will need to make sure you have plenty of room on your memory card. You don’t want your camera to fill up mid firing. Instead of shooting large raw files, I shot smaller jpegs. This allowed me to get more images in before the camera’s buffer filled up. I am shooting with a Canon 5d MarkII, so my camera’s buffer might be different form yours. The buffer is how many images you can take rapidly before your camera won’t take anymore until it has processed them. Play around and figure out what your camera’s capabilities are before you start taking you shot. That way you will know what to expect. Also, make sure that your camera is set on multiple shot mode and not single shot.

I took a couple hundred images between powdering the first and second doughnuts and this was my favorite.

I love how the sugar is captured mid shake! For the technical stuff, I shot this with a 100mm Macro lens at f3.2, 1/100 second shutter speed and ISO 500. I choose 1/100 because it would give some motion, but you would still be able to see some sugar falling.

Here is the lighting set up.

There is window light on the left with white foam board used as fill on the right.

Next post, I will show you what I did to the other doughnuts in the box.