Timothy Armes' blog

A very strange thing happened this Christmas – we made too much Chocolate sauce for the profiteroles. I know, it doesn’t sound possible – how can there ever be too much chocolate sauce?  I can only conclude that there must have been a hell of a lot of it to start off with.

So, I thought I’d take advantage of the unusual situation to create this image that I’ve had in my mind over the last few weeks.   I started by taking the photos of the chocolate sauce.  The consistency needed to be just right to get the look I was hoping for, and I was thrilled with the results.  I’ve put a couple of the resulting shots here to show you the results.

The photos were taken against a white wall which was lit just enough to overexpose it.  There was a softbox to the left of the poured chocolate and a reflector to the right, and these are responsible for the lovely long highlights on each side.  The twists were just the results of good luck.

I created an intial composition using three of the resulting images and then worked from there.  We had a box of particularly tasty chocolates so I took images of some of those (note that unlike the chocolate sauce we didn’t have too many of these).  I was careful to use the same lighting setup as above so that they would fit naturally into my composition.

The little round sweets were thrown by hand into the air and captured in mid-flight.

Finally I set forth upon the chocolate powder.  This was a lot harder to get right.  I tried all sorts of things to capture the powder in mid air but nothing worked well.  Eventually I decided to take a close-up shot of the powder on white paper using a Canon 135mm and some extension tubes.

Once I had all the elements I put them together using Photoshop to create the composition above.