48oz bundt sour-cream pound cake, cut to show slices illuminated by candle-light from the middle. Drizzled with dark chocolate syrup and melted white chocolate. Fresh-frozen fruit includes strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries. Garnish is mint and real strawberries, fan-cut.
I'm not a chef, so it took some practice to figure out working with chocolate, and I didn't even attempt the shavings this round. The first attempt didn't look too good, but at least it tasted fine at a dinner party.
I'm guessing that this image is too busy to do well for typical DPC voting, and it's probably overkill for meeting the challenge, but the idea was too fun, and I wanted to see the whole cake. More flash was brighter and better, but it over-powered the candle light, so I had to back it off to what is shown. I'm happy that the candle illumination worked out at least this much, I hope that people notice it and like it.
Tripod, cable release, MLU, manual exposure, Photek Softliter II 60" umbrella with 580EX above right, reflector on left, 580EX with diffuser on camera, wireles E-TTL II A:B 1:8, -3 FEC, candle in middle of cake.
Adobe Camera Raw, custom tone curve
PS crop, levels, resize, sharpen save for web (convert to sRGB, hue/saturation, color balance - still haven't figured out how to get the colors to match...).
Statistics
Place: 104 out of 155 Avg (all users): 5.0560 Avg (commenters): 5.6000 Avg (participants): 4.7059 Avg (non-participants): 5.1750 Views since voting: 1069 Views during voting: 414 Votes: 268 Comments: 6 Favorites: 0
Like the concept. Great dark background to highlight the red of the berries. Could have used a different lighting. Perhaps a bit more from underneath? I have actually used a sheet of glass propped on a couple of chairs with a transparent fabric over the glass, then used just a 25 or 40 watt bulb from below facing up, to get some more highlights.
several oxymorons...really clever! the image is good, perhaps a little more work needed on the lighting and maybe a more creative composition would really help this image