Awesome! The best place you can be for the health of your photography business is behind that camera. As soon as you can afford it hire out any job that takes you away from your 📸.

You are very welcome!

Unfortunately camera settings only apply to the specific scene that you are photographing at the specific time you're photographing it. So I can't really give you exact camera settings and have them do you any good. But I can tell you that when photographing a cake smash session shutter speed is always my main concern. Kids can move pretty quick and if your shutter speed isn't fast enough you're going to get blurry out of focus images. Again your shutter speed will depend on how fast the child is moving, how much light is in the scene ,what lens you're using and at what aperture. So the best I can do without knowing all the details is tell you that I like to keep my camera in manual mode and the shutter speed at around 1/400. I wish you the best of luck and I applaud you for taking the time to capture those precious moments. --Daniel Troutmanwww.TheSmashCake.com

Generally speaking, we don't smash a cake on a cloth background. Most of the time. I will use seamless paper as the floor or a vinyl backdrop as the floor so that when the kid smashes the cake, the frosting doesn't stain my more valuable cloth background. If you want to use your cloth background as both the background and the floor and you want to protect it from the frosting, what you need to do is go ahead and get yourself some plexiglass. They sell it at your home improvement stores in four by six sheets. As an added bonus, you will get a nice reflection of the child in the plexiglass That will give your photos a very polished look. In the next week or 2 I will be doing a video on this very topic and will be showing you how to use plexiglass in a smash cake session. So don't forget to subscribe and thanks for the great question.

I shoot mainly at f 4.0 and at f 2.8. I stick mainly around at 4.0 for the majority of the shoot and I ventured down to 2.8 for a few pictures here and there. The main reason is focus. I find f 4.0 to be a little more forgiving when it comes to getting more pictures in focus. But when I'm shooting on a small set in order to get the background out of focus I don't really have a choice and end up using 2.8 for the whole session. So in a perfect world I would build a larger set, use a zoom lens and use the compression of the zoom lens to create the f 2.8 look while still shooting at f 4.0. Thank you so very much for the comment and don't hesitate to ask if you have any more questions. Have a great day.

THANK YOU SO MUCH for taking the time to answer my question!!!

Thanks for the kind words and good luck to you on your first smash cake session!

Go with the thin vinyl. You will drive yourself nuts trying to get the wrinkles out of the sheet. :)

Check out your local fabric store, I’ve used thick white vinyl from there and it photographs great

The fill should never be directional. It should always come from behind the lens. The hair light needs to come from behind the subject. On a smash cake set I will put my light in a strip box, set the strip box horizontally, and have the light come over the top of the backdrop in the center. This gives the whole set and the child some backlight. With a strip light make sure you angel it down toward the child the way the sun would naturally hit them.

We have a set session fee, and we try to keep the set cost below that amount. I will make exceptions if it's a set that has a backdrop or props that I know I will use again.

Exactly. It's super easy and it saves you from having to mop the floor.

@@troutmanphoto thanks so much. I was going to use fabric backdrop, but like you said it will drive one crazy to get rid of the wrinkles, and it will be hard to edit afterwards

@@yuliyarivkina9301 just remember every minute you spend in Photoshop and not behind the camera you are loosing money. Thanks for the great question!