Our son recently turned one and after we started our photography business this summer, we decided to do a cake smash photo session with him for his first birthday. We shot our session with our Canon Rebel T3i DLSR Camera, which we highly recommend. However, if you don’t have a professional grade digital camera, it is possible to take high quality pictures even with your phone camera, as long as you can edit them.
We use this Cowboy Studio Backdrop Support set (shown above) to hold our backdrops. We knew that the process would be messy, and we didn’t want to use a backdrop that would get stained. So, we decided on a piece of Pacon fadeless bulletin board paper from Hobby Lobby as our backdrop. This is $9.99, but of course we used a 40% off coupon and snagged it for around $5.99 (This is the 48×50 inch roll). We also wanted to create the look of a wall and floor, so we used a piece of pre-painted trim from Lowe’s.
We showed you how to make your own pennant banner, so we used Jackson’s name banner as part of the backdrop. We purchased four balloons at our local Dollar Tree, and we decided on a store-bought cake for the photo session (Read our article about 15 Things You Should Be Buying at the Dollar Store). The bow tie was from our local Osh Kosh outlet store (It was on clearance for $4.99). We decided on a simple diaper since most of the shots were of him sitting down. However, he stood up and we did get that one crazy cute shot with the diaper! Oh well!
Once we had everything set up and ready (including the cake), we put on his bow tie, and started shooting as soon as we sat him down at the cake. With a little one, you have to get accurate shots very quickly. This means you should set your lighting up as much as possible beforehand. We had also taken test shots with the camera to ensure that our lighting was accurate. These photos were actually shot inside our studio around 8:30pm, so we really had to compensate for lighting.
I also edited the photos for shadows in Lightroom as well. If you don’t have access to Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom, I highly recommend Pic Monkey as a free online photo editing tool. It is my favorite and I use it all the time even in my professional photography.
Please comment any questions you have about this session if they were not answered in the post!
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