Baby Birthday Pink Balloon Shoot

My baby girl's first birthday party was a week ago.  After looking at photos on Pinterest for a few weeks (months) I had a perfect one that I wanted to copy.  It was a little girl sitting in a bright colored chair with a bunch of pink balloons floating above her.  So the morning of her party I went and bought 18 pink balloons, not an easy feat especially with our 100+ degree weather!

I thought I could use the balloons as party decorations and then also do a quick photo shoot.  Well, the best laid plans and all that but the balloons were only used that afternoon as decorations.  However, the next morning as the kids were playing with the fallen balloons on the ground I had the best idea and our pink-balloon shoot was born.

I love it!  You could also do the photos with a white backdrop on the ground and behind, but our kitchen floor worked just fine.

Just a bit of her birthday banner showing in the background.  I'll have another entry on her decorations and oh-so-yummy food menu coming soon.

These sweet little bloomers were a birthday gift the day before from a good friend.  Perfect for our photo shoot.

You can also add other props like a party blower.  A fun way to get some spontaneity in your photos.

My husband is the resident photographer and he developed the photos by applying a split tone in Adobe Lightroom 4.1.  We thought the cross processing turned out well so we decided to make a LR 4.1 preset and make it available for others to try out.   You can download the file here if have some sweet baby photos to develop, or would like to give the pinkish split toning a try:  

Pink Birthday Lightroom Preset

Let me know what you think!  A bit of warning: this preset was set to adjust all the settings for a photo including exposure, curves, everything.  If you only want to apply certain parts of the preset then you'll want to be sure to save your settings on the photo in question first, and then re-apply your settings that differ from the preset and save your own.   This one is not designed to be stacked or layered but that is easily changed by just re-saving it with the appropriate options unchecked.  We couldn't find a preset that captured the mood of the day the same way this did which is why it was created from scratch.   

There are so many Lightroom presets available on the Internet it is hard to know where to even begin.  We've waded through over 7000 presets, both paid and free.  There are some really great ones out there!   Here is our contribution at 7001 for your enjoyment.  

Even our dog got in the action.  He was all tuckered out after so much fun!