Trouble-Shooting a Cake Smash Shoot

Ever heard of a kid who doesn’t like cake?

Neither had I….

..until I shot my last cake smash.

I’ve been shooting for this beautiful family for a couple of years now and was entrusted to photograph baby Zain when he came in to this world a little over a year ago, so it was lovely to receive a request to photograph his first birthday. For this the family were keen to have a cake smash shoot so we pulled a few ideas from pinterest and picked a colour scheme. Props and balloons purchased, a 5 tired cake made, we were good to go. I checked over the equipment the night before, as I often do, trying to prepare for all eventualities, making sure I had back ups and spares of what I could. Capturing that first smash of the cake is imperative!

On the day of the session, I took everyone outside for a few family photographs before the cake smash. It’s always lovely to do if there’s time, especially on such a special occasion like a first birthday. I like to place the family in a few formal positions whilst mainly focusing on those in-between poses, the more natural photography poses that happen without direction. To me, these are the most special.

So after our family shoot we were ready for the cake smash. The props were in place, the lighting was tested, the cake was in the prime position, all we needed was the birthday boy. With my camera at eye-level, not wanting to miss that vital moment, we stood in anticipation whilst Zain’s mum placed him in front of the cake. We waited. And waited… Nothing.

Now any event photographer knows, to create a powerful photograph comes down to capturing that split second moment that’s so full of emotion: surprise; happiness; joy. I could not pull my camera away from my face for fear of missing this moment. But nothing was happening. By now I’m usually 100 photos in, icing everywhere, but Zain did not look interested in what was in front of him. After several minutes like this, trying to coax him to try the cake, a situation I admittedly did not prepare for, we started to think of ways to get him eating, even resorting to bribery in our desperation. After trying everything we could, he still wasn’t interested so we had to come up with alternatives. We hid raisins around the back of the cake to at least make it look like he was eating it and that’s were the shoot ended. After 30 minutes of trying to temp a little boy to eat cake - we were at a loss. We still got some lovely pictures from the day and its definitely a shoot I wont forget in a hurry. Who knew, not all kids like cake?!?

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