re: Photographing your cakes, do you use a special light?

I completely agree about natural light, but that’s not always an option. The bad thing about a light box is cakes don’t fit in them very well. Here’s the photo station we built in our kitchen:

http://cupadeecakes.blogspot.com/2010/07/photo-booth-station-complete.html

My recommendation is to learn the most you can about the camera you have. But my pictures immediately got better when I upgraded my point-and-shoot to an entry level DSLR. My DH and I started taking photography classes and learning the basics of aperture, shutter speed, ISO, etc. and our photos got better. Now we’re learning to use post processing programs like Lightroom and we can already see a difference in our photos.