So I saw this awesomely creative post from a photog I found via Pinterest. HERE is the pin that I pinned because I just knew that I wanted to do something similar to this with the balloons for Qade’s birthday portraits. I feel like I should be posting this on that “pinterest fail” blog or something, because what I ended up with was NOTHING at all like my inspiration. And though I don’t like to copy other photographers work completely, the look I ended up with was so far beyond my imagination of what my own take on this session would be.
First off, I din’t have a wall to work with. BUT I had seen a cool pin about how to make a balloon banner just by threading balloons on a string or yarn with a needle. That part worked like a charm! I figured I’d be able to stretch the string across my backdrop stand and tie it to either side and not need a wall. :/ Yeah, right! Those feisty balloons refused to do right!! They were flopping all backwards and bulging out in places, falling behind each other. It was a disaster!!
Oh, and I had forgotten how much I hate to blow up balloons. I’m always afraid that they are going to explode while I’m in the process of blowing them up, and that my eyeballs will be blasted out of their sockets. So I sat in the studio blowing up all of these balloons with my eyes squeezed as tightly shut as I could. 😀 Ha ha! Fortunately I kept my eyes intact and none of the balloons exploded.
But I did have to come up with another solution for the sagging/flopping/rebellious balloon problem. I ended up clamping the backdrop to the stand behind the balloons, and taping the strings to the backdrop. It worked, but messed up some of the “effect” I was going for by having the backdrop slightly farther back, and now the wrinkles showed up plainly. BUT there is no way I would have been able to steam that drop at this point. Plus I din’t want to have to wrestle it back into position with the floor and the backdrop stand.
That was another thing. I spend probably 45 minutes just trying to get the floor set up in a way that would look somewhat natural. It was because of the YELLOW balloons being on the bottom. They were too easy to see through, and the edge of the floor looked really weird through them. Silly!!
Anyway, by the time I got the balloons in place (more or less) and the floor kinda doing what it should have been, I was less than interested in actually shooting a session. However I had no intention of leaving that set up till the next day for fear the balloons would pop or deflate or something equally as tragic, so I popped some clean clothes on Qade as soon as he emerged from his nap and we shot away. He wasn’t in the best mood for a shoot either, and a lot of the “cheese” shots I got were more grimaces than real smiles. So I told him not to say cheese and we started looking for other words to use. When I told him to say, “My name is Aiden” that’s when I got the biggest smile.
Because obviously, his name is….
More photos from this session to follow. I just had to rant about how difficult this was. I will NEVER do this set-up again. Fair warning. 😉