How To Perfect Your Next Confetti Photoshoot

Kids Love a Confetti Photo Session! 

I’ve always wanted to try and shoot confetti images! They are fun, whimsical, colourful, and I knew my kids would love them. And let’s face it…for most of us, photo sessions need to be fun for our kids to participate willingly!

The end result I was going for was my daughter softly blowing the confetti towards the camera, and I think we nailed it!

You should totally give this a go! Share your confetti photo on Instagram and tag #ClickLoveGrowChallenge

What You’ll Need

• Your Camera (hehe!)
• Confetti (I used coloured circles)
• A plain background/wall. I used thunder grey background paper, but a plain wall will be fine

The Set-up

Being winter, we chose to shoot the confetti images inside relying on window light. I set up in front of a large window and used my thunder grey backdrop as I knew the colour would pop against it.

You don’t need a professional backdrop…a plain wall will look great. If I were doing this in warmer weather, I would have used a plain wall in our foyer with the door open to let in light or my patio wall outside. But as it were, I needed to shoot in a position in the house that needed the backdrop to avoid the surrounding clutter.

Related: Kids Photography – Bubble Photos

Camera Settings For a Confetti Shoot

Admittedly this was a trial and error operation, and I had to give it a few go’s so that I could get the look I was going for. Where I needed to tweak:

• At first, I used a wide-open aperture, but the confetti was all out of focus blobs.
• My shutter speed was too slow, and I ended up with blurry confetti images because it was moving so fast.
• My exposure was a little bright at first. This resulted in blown highlights on pieces of confetti as they hit the light, and their colour was lost.
• A few times, the confetti concealed my daughter’s face…
• And a few times she didn’t have enough, and the effect didn’t work!

Adjustments

My test shots led me to make adjustments based on the following lessons learned:

• Narrower aperture to get her face and some of the confetti in focus
• Faster shutter speed to freeze the motion of the confetti
• With those two requirements, I lost some light so I needed to boost my ISO significantly
• Made sure she used lots of confetti!
• And took a lot of shots on burst mode to give me the best chance of getting a shot that didn’t conceal her features

My Confetti Images’ Final Settings

Aperture: f/4

Shutter Speed: 1/500

ISO: 1600

I cropped in Lightroom, increased exposure by a touch, increased blacks a smidge, and added a little vibrancy to bring out the colours.

Related: Getting Out of Auto

Now, Let’s Get Real!

How many confetti images did I shoot? Yikes, probably a hundred…but hey, that’s half the fun!

Lucy and I had a blast and I know you will too!

Related: 10 Dreamy Photos Using Natural Light Photography

Share your Results!

Have a go at our tutorial and share your final confetti photo with us on Instagram. Tag #ClickLoveGrowChallenge so we can all have a peek!

Have fun!

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