How To Photograph Your Child’s Birthday Party
Okay, the moment has come – the moment you’ve been dreading for approximately 364 days. Your child is about to have a birthday party, and that means a group of even more children is about to run riot inside your home.
Only joking. Although the mass of children – all of whom are dizzy on lemonade – can be gruelling, any child’s birthday should always be a fun and enjoyable affair. They are one year older, after all, and that is something that needs to be celebrated. Sugar and all!
Another way to celebrate it, of course, is through photographs. No matter how old your child is turning, they only turn that age once, so it’s important to capture the celebrations in all their messy glory for future nostalgia. If you’re planning on putting the best pictures on your Instagram, you can even use those photos to create a birthday themed Instagram photo book – one for each year you celebrate with them.
But before you do that, you need to know how to actually take good birthday pictures. Every child’s birthday is naturally pretty chaotic, and capturing it can be chaotic too. With this in mind, here are five ways to do it efficiently:
Pre-Plan To Minimise The Chaos
The key to every photography session is pre-planning. That doesn’t matter whether you’re working out how to take rural photography or pictures of your child’s birthday party. Planning always leads to perfection. Your photographs are bound to feel rushed and all over the place, especially if there is a large group of wild children.
With planning, however, you can know exactly when to get the phone out. You can organise the room into specific areas for party games or cutting the cake, you can work out exactly where the guests will be sitting, and you can know exactly where to stand – and at what time – to get the best pictures possible.
It’s All About Details
Once again, parties can feel a little chaotic at times, and this often comes across in the photographs. In many ways, the beauty of what you have organised can get lost in the grand scheme of things, so you need to remember to capture the details. The icing on the cake, the party food, the balloons, the presents. Make sure you take a quiet moment before the party begins for beautiful pictures of these details, especially if you are going to put them through our photo book maker to document the full story. They are sure to add some variety and ensure you remember all of the specifics.
Capture The Facial Expressions
It can be easy to simply go for group shots when photographing a birthday party, but one of the best things about these parties is how happy they make the children. Ensure you capture the emotions by taking singular photographs of facial expressions. Joy, excitement, even those temper tantrums when they don’t win at pass-the-parcel! A top tip in this area is getting down on your hands and knees. No, seriously, you read that correctly. If you get down to their level during one of the party games for kids, you can feel a little more connected to what the child is experiencing, and this will definitely come across in the images themselves.
Plan But Don’t Over Plan
Of course, we have advised that you put some planning into photographing the event, but that doesn’t mean you should over plan. Over planning or choreographing every photograph can lead them to feel static and staged, but it’s important to sometimes embrace that chaotic energy. Who knows? An unplanned shot of your child jumping in excitement or yawning with exhaustion once the party is over might end up being your best photograph. Keep things candid while you can and don’t be afraid to take quick snaps one after the other, even if you don’t think there’s anything substantial to capture. You might just be surprised!
Live In The Moment
Lastly, it’s important to remember that this is your child’s birthday party. In this way, it is important to live in the moment and actually take it in, without a phone being in front of you the whole time. Of course, taking photographs can help you remember it, but they will never be the same as actually experiencing it. This is why you need to ensure that experience actually happens, and you take in all of those special moments without technology getting in the way of it. You’re sure to get enough photographs whilst also living in the moment, so make sure to put the phone down every once in a while!
