Falling Hearts photoshoot
Valentine's Day is nearly here. So that means it's time for adorable photoshoots with hearts, pinks and red colours and other love themed items. I did a photoshoot with my guinea pig Lies and some falling hearts. Continue to read if you want to find out how I did it.
EXIF: Nikon D750 | iso 400 | 1/800 | f2.2 | 85mm
Time for a cute photoshoot for Valentine's Day! I did photoshoots like these in the past, so I still had the hearts from the previous photoshoot. You can always reuse a prop, so don't throw stuff away after you've used it. If I could give you one advice: go for a darker shade of pink so the hearts will really pop. The hearts I already had are a pale shade of pink and I need to enhance the colour in Photoshop a lot for the hearts to really stand out.
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
This is a super easy set up. All you will need is a colourful backdrop and some paper hearts. You can also make paper hearts from newspapers, magazines; be creative if you don't have coloured paper.
You will need:
📷 Backdrop. For photoshoots like this I like to work in monochrome colors or with colors that really pop. I went for a yellow-pink theme this time, because I did a monochrome setup
in 2021.
📷 Hearts. My experience is that paper hearts will fall the most beautifully. I tried felt hearts, but they stuck together and were very hard to throw. So that was a no go for me.
Optional:
📷 Reflective screen to light up the shadow side. I placed mine on the right on the opposite of my light source (windows). You can also use a white sheet or some aluminium foil.
📷 Flash to freeze the movement of the falling hearts.
📷 Other props. I like to keep images like these simple as a lot is already going on.
How to capture falling hearts
Falling hearts look so cute and playful in a photo. The easiest way is to use a flash to freeze the movement of the falling hearts, but I don't have a flash and I do not like to use one when I
work with animals. There are two other ways to accomplish this effect.
The first one is to focus, set your camera on a timer to take multiple photos and to actually throw the hearts. You will get a very natural look with this, but it might be tricky to capture the
hearts mid air as they're falling. Especially if you are not using a flash to freeze the movement, some hearts may get a bit blurry.
I used to do it like the first method and it would take me forever to capture enough falling hearts to fill the entire frame with the hearts.
The second method is what I did this time: with a stick, tweezers or thread you can hold the hearts in frame one by one and snap a photo. In Photoshop you can remove the thing you used to hold
them. And there you have your hearts. Make sure to hold the hearts in various places across your frame, in different angles and all in the back and all in the front.
You can add some kind of motion blur in post processing to give the hearts the look of actually falling.
BEFORE AND AFTER EDITING
Here are some more Valentine's Day inspired photos
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