📷DIY Gender Announcement Photos
Doing a gender announcement or birth announcement can be a lot of fun and is a great way to make wonderful memories to keep forever!
What better way to announce to the world the arrival of a new family member, than doing your own gender announcement photo shoot! Especially if you have little ones to take part in all the fun. Choose a colour, get some fun props to match and find a great location to take your pictures. Taking photos at the right time of day outdoors will almost always turn out great. Natural sunlight can be your best friend if you want to take professional looking photos without paying the cost of a professional photographer.
USE FUN PROPS!
It's great to include colourful props to stage your shoot. Get the kids involved and make a sign in advance. Give them creative freedom with 'a little' help from mom or dad and you're sure to have a wonderful masterpiece. Or bring art work from home, you can use as a backdrop. You can also use fresh flowers and mini balloons from the grocery store/market that match the colours in your theme and have the children hold them. Another great item to bring from home is a chair or a stool.... perfect to use for displaying your other props.
We did our gender announcement pictures last June in my parents' backyard. They were such good sports about helping take pictures and keeping everything somewhat organized. The weather was perfect and everything went off without a hitch (for the most part).
Great tip for taking pictures outdoors - make sure the sun is not directly above you. In the morning before 11:00 and in the late afternoon after 3:00 is ideal. And it's always good to use a photo editing program to edit your pictures afterwards to fix any flaws or imperfections, just like the pros do, but FREE of charge! The free programs I like to use are PicMonkey and Google's Picasa. There are many other great free photo editors out there you can use as well, easily found online.
Natural light from the sun is the best lighting for pictures. Whenever possible, take pictures during the day outdoors or indoors in a well naturally ilt room with no other light source. Do not turn on interior lights for your photos. If you use only natural light, you'll notice a big difference in the colour of your picture... it'll have less yellow.
Everything in our photo shoot was blue! From our clothes & accessories, right down to our footwear!
Have fun with finger paint! Wear a white T-shirt and get the kids to cover the palms of their hands with paint and place them on your tummy. This also makes for a great keepsake for baby later. Make sure you have a bucket of warm water with soap and cloth handy to wash-up right after. 😉
Fill a clear glass jar with candy and let the kids dig in during the shoot. It will keep them entertained too, if the photoshoot starts to get a bit dull after a while. We all know as parents, we have a pretty small window to do something like this, until the kids start to get restless. And it would probably be a good idea to save the candy gobbling 'til the end, just in case their teeth change colour or they get it on their clothes. We got all of our blue candy from Bulk Barn.
As you can see in the picture below, my daughter's fingers and mouth had turned blue from the candy she ate. I personally love it! And decided to leave it in the photo (instead of editing it out) because I like that it really captures the fun moment the kids were having. What I also love about this photo is her very cute attempt of blowing a bubblegum bubble and her brother watching her intently to see if she could accomplish this task.
It's also a lot of fun doing a reveal party with family and friends. We did ours with our family at a cottage. The only person that knew the baby's gender was my mom. She came with me to my ultrasound and was great at keeping the secret to herself for almost a whole month. For the reveal she had everyone pick out a pink or blue heart (depending on their guess) and made a blue cake covered in thick white icing. All the kids were trying to take a peek when she was frosting the cake. Everyone threw their confetti hearts in the air when we cut into the cake. It was great!
Thanks for stopping by!
