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How to Take Confetti Photos
Kids Love a Confetti Photo Session!
I’ve always wanted to try confetti photos! They’re fun, whimsical, colourful and I knew my kids would love it! And let’s face it… for most of us, photo sessions need to be fun for our kids to willingly participate!
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 background paper, colour: thundergrey but a plain wall will be fine
The Set-up
Being winter we chose to shoot inside and relied 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 which needed the backdrop to avoid the surrounding clutter.
Camera Settings
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 were all be out of focus blobs.
My shutter speed was too slow, and I ended up with blurry confetti because it was moving so fast.
My exposure was a little bright at first, which 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 daughters 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 myself the best chance of getting a shot which didn’t conceal her features
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.
Yes so she blew them herself, and it took a few goes and me explaining to do it softly, but high enough that it blew towards the camera.. and all handheld, as I am too lazy to set my tripod up!
Another shot we did a few times was her throwing the confetti in the air, it fell in a cool way around her and was fun!
Great post! Loved the information and how cute these photos turned out!!
How did you blow the confetti? Did someone drop it? Or did the little girl blow it from her hands? Or both?
Did you have your camera on a trips or were you hand holding it?
Thanks so much! Cheerio, Mee
Thanks Melissa!
Yes so she blew them herself, and it took a few goes and me explaining to do it softly, but high enough that it blew towards the camera.. and all handheld, as I am too lazy to set my tripod up!
Another shot we did a few times was her throwing the confetti in the air, it fell in a cool way around her and was fun!
Hi, what focus setting did you use please?