How to Take Confetti Photos

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.

Related: Getting out of Auto

Now, Let’s Get Real!

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

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

confetti photo portraits

Share your Results!

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

Have fun!