Don’t forget to say cheese!

This camera was for a graduate in fine arts, and an old fashioned camera was on her graduation invites. The recipient is also starting her own photography business. So when left to come up with an appropriate design copying the camera from the invite seemed the obvious choice.

The design needed a little altering to make it suitable for cake, that huge gaping hole at the bottom just had to go! We simplified it a little too.

It’s all butter cake filled with raspberry jam and as is the norm for most of our cakes, covered in fondant. The lens was made from gumpaste. A respectable size, the box at the back was 7″x7″x4″ with the front of the camera coming out at about 6 and a half inches.

Since this is a camera cake, we thought we would take the opportunity to show you our “studio.” The frames for the backdrop and for the lights is all pvc piping so we can dismantle it and have it not take up too much room. The lights are work lights from Home Depot with a frosted lampshade over them to diffuse the light, we can adjust the heights on them, though we generally bounce one off of the ceiling as you can see. And yes, that is a cake drum you see at the front, we use that as a reflector to bounce light back into the shadowy areas.

Halfway through writing this post, I had to stop, and look up the origin of the phrase I used as my title, “watch the birdie.” Turns out variations on it were used all over Europe when the cameras (like the one we made) looked vaguely like a nesting box. Some photographers went so far as to make a little metal bird as a focal point for their subjects. Other phrases, like “cheeeeeese” are used for the elongated vowel sound that shows your teeth .