Walton Creative News Blog. A behind the camera look at WaltonCreative. With News, Photographs and Comments.

I wanted to give biscuits for Christmas presents this year so took the opportunity to photograph them being made. I had originally imagined solid, star-shaped biscuits, then discovered if I used a smaller cutter as well, I could make weight watcher's biscuits too! The biscuit cutters also came in a heart-shaped version, so I couldn't resist making these as well. Maybe the photo might sell on Alamy for Valentines day? The biscuits were shot with a new f1.4 lens so I could achieve an incredibly shallow depth of field. I wanted the shots to be very bright and high-key so took the ginger biscuits out of the oven early to avoid them looking too dark. The next stage is to shoot the biscuits being packed into their boxes and tied with ribbon. Watch this space!

I saw this lovely marzipan Santa on a recent trip to Budapest. I wanted a solid background – which would have to be much larger than a real cake would be. So (as usual) I managed to make a simple idea a lot more complicated by creating a lake of false icing to sit him on.

I had hoped for that lovely spiky icing I have created lots of times before to disguise a rough top. But this time whatever I did the icing looked like either mashed potato or rice pudding!

To make matters even more complicated I had the idea of a giant knife cutting into the cake to make the most of Santa’s lovely anxious expression – to look as if he was worried about being chopped.

So the plan was to buy a small piece of real Christmas cake and to insert it into the fake lake of icing…. Well actually it worked, the only problem in the end was that the knife looked far too inappropriate for a Christmas card – well you can’t say I didn’t make an effort!