Matti's Seventh Month DIY Pictorial, Masking on Photoshop!

Even before Matti, my firstborn was born, I already had this idea of taking monthly update pictures. In this way, I would have memories to recall when we get older, that includes him of course. For sure, when he is bigger, he would love to see how he looked like when he was way younger when he was a baby. I am actually getting emotional as I write this.

Today, Matti turns seven months and of course, I have posted a monthly update on social media. We had been doing this for seven months already and this is a Do It Yourself Photoshoot. My husband and I think of his monthly pictorial, conceptualize it and take the photos. I actually do all the thinking and the taking of pictures down to the post-editing while the husband just supports me. Teehee. Well, that's how husbands should do.

This month's concept is a naked cake with fruits on top as Matti started his baby-led weaning journey, I decided to just showcase some of the food, fruits, and vegetables that he had tried eating so far. Actually, I first thought of adding vegetables such as broccoli, squash, and cauliflower but since I had cooked them already a few days ago, I just took anything that is available in the kitchen.

The naked cake, I ordered days before from the local bakery here in our place, Sticky Buns and I just look for anything that he could wear which ended up to be a snoopy sleeveless top and dinosaur shorts.

I thought it would be easy but it was so hard to take pictures with a baby who sits and wants to play around. My husband first positioned him to sit on his play mat inside the playpen but he would move here and there and would try to reach the cake. In the past, he had already hit the cake multiple times.

We used a Sony A73 with a Sigma 35mm lens to take these photos and I edited the images using the Adobe Lightroom Classic. Since we had a hard time taking his photos with the cake, we ended up taking a photo of the cake and a separate photo of him and I used the masking tool to merge the two photos using Adobe Photoshop.

Here are the original photos:

This is the end result:

The masking tool on Photoshop really helped me in making this pictorial a success even though it was not what I imagined it to be. In fact, before we wrapped up the photo session, we had a power outage so we had to stop as our room was dark without our softbox light.

Some of the photos we took included the cake, Matti in the playmat lying and that's it. It took us less than an hour to prepare the cake, prepare Matti, and took the photos. When taking pictures of a baby who moves a lot, we had to use a fast shutter speed, I guess I used 1/250 shutter speed because we had a softbox, we had no problem with the ISO. The aperture was set here to f2 or f2.5.

Here are some photos:

Any new parents on this site too who are like us who take monthly photos of their baby? I would love to connect to moms out there. I write articles about motherhood on blurt, go check it out too: https://blurt.world/@junebride

xoxo,

mommy jean of momentswithmatti

Love harder than any pain you've ever felt.