DIY Cake Smash Session How-To and Commentary

I first published Lucy's cake smash a few days ago, and now here is the How-To!

The cake smash portrait session is a semi-new photography trend for babies celebrating their first year.  In fact, if you search Google Images for "cake smash," you come up with dozens of images with identical formats - namely, this one:

... where each grey square represents a different photo from a portrait session of baby eating birthday cake.

We decided to try it - Daniel and me.  With some money I was given for a portrait session a few months ago, I purchased my first ever official photography backdrop - a blue Diamond Cloth.



This I hung up in the piano room, using a spare curtain rod we had in the garage.  After doing some research and looking closely at many of the Google images, I found out most photographers use plexi-glass for this session.  It not only protects the backdrop fabric but also provides a pleasant reflection for close-up shots.  So I bought a piece of plexi-glass (4'x3' - about $30) from my local big box hardware store, and we were good to go. 



A couple practice shots were informative, because they revealed I would need more light.   



...So I waited until about 2 PM, so that the sun would be shining fully into the skylight in the piano room, and then we ghetto-rigged a car windshield sun shade to reflect some of the sunlight onto the cloth. 



I baked a 6 inch round cake and made chocolate buttercream icing on the day of the photo shoot.



Daniel got Lucy all dressed and ready while I prepared the camera.

To avoid a higher-than-desired automatic ISO (makes graininess) and slower-than-desired shutter speed (makes images blurry b/c of motion), I shot in manual mode with a 50 mm lens - with the following settings:
ISO of 320
Shutter speed of 1/60
Aperture at f/2.5

Don't attempt to do this photo shoot by yourself - there absolutely must be two people present.  Partly because the subject (Lucy, in this case) doesn't find the camera that interesting or amusing, so a key-shaking, funny noise-making partner is an absolute necessity for getting smiles.



...And partly because bath time needs to follow immediately after the session is over--like, I'm talking fill the tub up beforehand, so it's ready to go.



Over exposure and white balance were issues for me.  Despite all the natural sunlight, the photos still came out looking simultaneously washed-out and overly saturated.  I didn't even know that was possible.  Decreasing the exposure and increasing the highlights, followed by applying a cooling filter at 13% strength in PhotoShop Elements, seemed to fix the problem (see above).

In hindsight, I probably should have used a faster shutter speed, which would have cut down on motion blur and also fixed my over-exposure problem.

Formatting the cake smash collage was a witch, with a capital B.  I stumbled across a very helpful person on ILovePhotography.com, who published the template she created (pictured above with the grey squares) - and she deserves mad props, because it must have taken her hours.   

If any of you aspiring photographers are interested in doing this shoot, I hope this helps!  Feel free to email me if you have any questions, or leave me a comment!