home studio

Spring Flower Petites!

Spring is here! Well, kind of in Montana. The weather here is all over the place. One minute it’s warm and sunny out, the next it's raining, then super fuckin windy and cold. Then before you know it it’s snowing. I know, every state says ‘Just give the weather 5 minutes, it’ll change’, but Montana is really like that.

Even with the weather being all over the place, spring has still sprung! The grass is growing back, the trees and hedges are starting to develop little buds on them. Little flowers are starting to pop up. It’s a magical time of year.

I had this bride come to me with this amazing idea for some spring-themed engagement photos. With all my weddings I offer a free engagement or family shoot to give us a chance to work together. This bride came to me with a great idea to do engagement pictures surrounded by hanging flowers. Thankfully I already had a bunch of fake flowers and set-up my home studio, so I was able to bring her vision to life!

After doing their shoot, I had all those hanging flowers. With this bride's permission, she let me use her idea to do Spring Flower Petites with them! Petites are just like minis, they are a short photo session for a cheaper price, I just gave them a different name to help make them stand out.

I advertised them on my photography Instagram, but once I announced they were open for signups no one hit me up to do them. Dude, it was literally crickets. Haha. God bless Facebook though. I shared these petites on FB Marketplace and in the selling groups and so many people were interested in them! I had 3 shoots this past Saturday and my week is filled with them.

I’m so pumped people signed up for these. It’s so embarrassing when you put a creative idea out there and no one signs up for it. It’s hard to not take it personally.

The setup for this shoot is in my home studio. I did a two-light setup for these shoots. One light (the key light) was in front of the families/couples and I had one pointed on the background of the paper (the fill light) to help with all the shadows from the key light. I’ve been using white background paper with the flowers hanging all over in front of it, but thankfully some people wanted to use colored background paper.

I didn't realize that I was almost out of white paper when I started advertising. Haha. One thing I’m learning with having a studio is that seamless paper gets so dirty! It probably doesn’t help that there is a bunch of dirt around the shop and that my studio is in my fiance's workshop.

I’m figuring out ways to keep the paper clean though. I tried spraying it with this latex finish which made it easier to wipe off some dirt, but it didn't fully keep the dirt off. Last night I spray painted the dirty spots with white spray paint so hopefully that helps make my white paper last until I get my next roll.

I love how the pictures have been turning out though! I hope you guys like the pictures too!