My Best 5 Tips to Improve Your Cake Photography!

Help your cake business thrive by putting your best cake photo forward! Grab potential clients' attention and win their business with beautiful, professional photos. Let's get started with My Top 5 Tips to Improve Your Cake Photography!

Originally posted October 4, 2015. Updated January 18, 2022

If there's one area where I see cake decorators struggle over and over with their business (outside of actual baking/decorating skills), it's taking great photos of their cakes. That's why today I want to share with you My Best Tips to Improve Your Cake Photography!!

Y'all - good image quality and Facebook are the reason I have a cake business. Seriously. I've never paid for advertising! How did I start and grow my cake business?

By posting photos on Facebook.

More importantly, by posting great photos of my cakes on Facebook.

So why am I telling you this? Because if you struggle to take amazing pictures of your already amazing cakes - then here's your opportunity to change that! Are you ready for my best tips (and the #1 problem area I see most often)?

Related: 5 Easy Wasy to Grow Your Cake Business

A lot of you may think you need a crazy expensive DSLR camera and lens to get that perfect shot, but that's not true. With smartphone cameras getting better and better, having a professional camera is not necessary to take a great photo.

And you don't need fancy tricks or expensive software - just some basic knowledge will improve your photos dramatically. I'm going to lay outsome basic things almost anybody can do to get great shots!

My Best 5 Tips to Improve Your Cake Photography!

The best way to learn to take better photos is to practice, practice, and practice some more. While doing that, keep these tips in mind.

#1 Lighting!

One of the very best things you can do is make your pictures brighter. BRIGHTER! Fewer shadows and more exposure automatically make your pictures better in an instant.

I know you may think I'm crazy, but look at this:

Note: these photos (above) are old and even my photography has improved greatly since taking them, but you still get my point.

To take this pic I used white foam boards (on the table and for the backing), then set them up in front of my open front door for beautiful natural light.

The only difference between the picture on the left and the one on the right is an extra white foam board that I propped up (on a cupcake box) to use as a reflector! BOOM - the shadows are gone and immediately my picture looks 100% better!

Amazing right? You must, must, MUST brighten up your pics!

If natural light is not an option because maybe you work at night or you live in the northern part of the country with fewer daylight hours, there are other options. Or maybe you just don't have a window with good lighting in your home.

Well, the next best option is to get good artificial lights to supplement your photography.

You might think I'm talking about flash, but I'm not. Using flash photography requires more expensive equipment and a lot more knowledge. I do not recommend it for a beginner photographer. I've been doing food photography for many, many years and I still don't use flash.

However, I'm a huge fan of Lowel Ego Lights. I've been using them for years and all the photos taken in my cake room (see below) are done with my Lowel Ego Lights (because the window is shaded 90% of the time).

While we're on the topic of light, it's best to have the light coming from the side or back of your cake. I know it might seem "right" to put the light in front of the cake, but it's truly not. Frontal light washes out your cake and provides very little interest or contrast.

For my cakes, my Ego Lights are always on one side of my cakes and when I shoot on my dining room table in natural light, the light is from the back and/or sides. See pics below...

#2 Light or White Neutral Background

Again, there are so many easy/cheap solutions for this. Use white foam boards, as I mentioned above. Or even a white/gray wall in your house. My newer cake photos are almost all set in my cake room with my creamy light walls as the background:

For the photo above, I'm using my Lowel Ego Light and the cake is on a stand, on my granite countertop with my creamy white wall for the background.

OR my other option is to shoot in my dining area with the sheer curtains and natural light for the background:

We have a bay window around our dining room table so cakes get light from both sides and the back (unless I shoot from another angle), making for a very light and airy ethereal feeling to the photos I shoot here.

In addition to a white background, consider the surface. I chose the light gray granite countertop (River White is the color if you're curious) in my kitchen when we remodeled specifically keeping in mind that I'd be using it for photography.

I also have some backdrops that I spread out to use as a surface or I shoot on my table, which is made of Knotty Alder wood:

#3 Keep in Minimal

Unlike other types of styled food photography, I'm a big fan of letting your cake be the star of your photos! I love pretty cake stands (I have a huge collection), but beyond that, having simple, neutral background and surfaces is key for cake photos.

If you want to use props (such as plates, napkins, forks, spoons or other utensils), keep them simple, neutral, and/or have them "match" the cake. Here are a couple of examples of cakes I've photographed with props, while keeping the cake as the main subject of the photo:

This Nerf Cake was shot on the same counter, with the wall for the background and my Ego light on the side. I added some real Nerf bullets to give the composition a little more interest.

Since this Spiced Oat Cake was all-white, I decided to use a cake stand with a little character and a cloth napkin underneath. This added some layers and depth to the photo. My Ego Light was set to the left of the cake.

#4 Choose the best Angle to Photograph Your Cake

I most often shoot my cakes head on and slightly above. That usually allows me to capture the topper, the cake board and part of the stand.

If you look back through the photos I've shared so far, they've all been from slightly above (except for the Spiced Oat Cake).

Having said that, there's really no definite right or wrong angle for cakes... it's only right if it's the most flattering and shows the details you want to highlight. Here are some cakes I've shot from different angles and why I chose those angles...

Shoot from above:

I shot this Stack of Books from above because I wanted to capture all of the details, including the Hungry Caterpillar on top.

This groom's cake also looked best shot from above so that I captured the duck topper and all the details.

Shoot Straight On:

I don't shoot straight on or head on very often because I usually want the top of the cake to be seen. But sometimes, it's the best angle.

This recent wedding cake was 6-tiers tall. I couldn't have shot it from above, even if I'd wanted to. But because the topper was a whole tier of sugar flowers that could easily be seen from the front, shooting from above wasn't needed.

Shooting straight-on allowed me to capture all the flowers, top to bottom!

This wedding cake didn't have a topper. To really let the gold lace shine, I squatted down a little to get dead-on level with it. It really made the sharp corners and fine details of the lace shine!

And then there's this Baby Christening Cake. Again, no topper, so I really wanted attention drawn to the framed cross on the front.

Shooting from Below:

I mostly use this angle when I want to really emphasize how tall a cake is. Or for some reason I want to show off the cake stand 😊

I got down below the bottom of this Sports cake to look up at it. It was such a statement cake - I wanted the height to shine. Also, the cake stand was very sentimental to the family, so I wanted it very visible in the photos.

This rainbow cake was only one tier, but it was still a tall cake and I wanted all the rainbow buttercream to really stand out. I loved this angle so much more than the angle from above that I usually shoot:

See what I mean? Which angle do you prefer?

And then this super heroes cake:

I can't explain why, but this Incredibles Cake also looked best looking up at it vs. straight-on or from above.

Overhead Shots:

It's very rare for me to shoot a directly overhead shot of a decorated cake, but I do have a couple of examples where it made sense:

This Buttercream Palette Painted Cake really warranted an overhead shot. It was the only way to really capture the full scope of the painting I did with buttercream.

The shotgun cake, bucket of crawfish cake and redfish cakes below also needed overhead shots to fully capture the cakes:

#5 Editing Software

Most of the things I've mentioned above can be worked on without spending any or very little money. You can use natural light, good angles, simp props and backgrounds, and the right angle to take great photos with your phone or camera.

Then you can proudly share them on social media to grow your business.

But what if you want to take it a step further? Insert photo editing software - like Photoshop, Lightroom, or the less expensive Picmonkey. All professional photographers use some kind of software for improving their photos. Picmonkey is fairly easy to use and easily accessed on the internet. Photoshop has a much steeper learning curve, but is also a much more powerful tool that you can download to your laptop.

I took an in-person cake class to learn more about my camera and Photoshop, but you can easily learn from free Youtube videos and online tutorials if you can't afford to invest in a class.

I'm reverting to my original post photos again, but for the Princess Cake, I cropped it, brightened it, cleaned up the background and watermarked it to really make the cake shine:

Here's another example of a before/after using Photoshop to edit a cake photo:

I cropped and brightened the photo. Then sharpened it and added my watermark. And it's so, so much better than the original, right?

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So there you go - my top 5 tips to improve your food photography. If you want to learn more, I have some of my favorite resources linked up below!

My Camera and Lenses:

• I started shooting years ago with a Canon Rebel. I've upgraded a few times over almost 15 years and currently use a Canon 7D.
• Probably 99% of my cake photos are shot with my Canon EF 28mm f/1.8 lens. When I take my camera onsite to a wedding, I also carry along my Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6, when is more general purpose.
• As mentioned many times, I use natural light or my Lowel Ego Lights for lighting.
• For backdrops, I use my white walls or sheer curtains, but if I want to change things up, I also love these backdrops.
• For light diffusion, I pull a white pillow case over my Ego Light. For light reflection, I use white foam boards or these cheap reflection boards that stand on their own.

If you have any other questions, please leave me a comment!

Want to learn more about food photography?

My #1 recommendation is this ebook: Tasty Food Photography.

Prefer a real book? Plate to Pixel and Food Photography are two fantastic resources!

If you like online classes, sign up for Craftsy and watch any or all of the photography classes offered there.