Balloons are a popular accessory when it comes to cake smashes and tub splashes for the obvious reason is that they are just such a staple party accessory.

However, they can be a bit of a problem when it comes to working within the context of a photo shoot for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, if they are loose on the floor, they are a very tempting thing to chase around.  More tempting sometimes than the cake!  So it can become a problem getting your little one to stay still and show an interest in the gorgeous sweet treat you are giving them.  Also, they are fun to hold and that can mean that you get quite a lot of photos where your baby’s face is obscured by a balloon!  So I’d say that loose balloons are probably not the way to go.

Secondly, it’s a natural idea to bring along the giant foil balloons in the shape of a one as they are very pretty but the problem there is that they are also quite tall.  Even if we tie them so they are very close to the ground, they are still a lot taller than your baby when they are sitting down with the cake which means that you quite often only get the bottom part of the balloon in the shot and you don’t see that they are a ‘1’ but more of just a random foil column.  They twist around quite a lot too so they’re not always the right way around.  They are cute but in terms of a cake smash they don’t work so well – they do however work well if your baby is standing while supported as part of the clean shoot at the start of the session.

Bunches of helium balloons can look cute but you need to tie them basically to the top of the balloon weight otherwise you only really get the strings in the image.

The best way of using balloons in a cake smash photo shoot I have found is to create a balloon garland.  That’s not as fancy or difficult as it sounds as all you really need is a pack of balloons and this balloon tape.

You can get it from lots of places and it’s not super expensive.  Basically it allows you to string the balloons together into a column really easily then we can lay it along the floor at the back of the scene or attach it to the wall.  I should say though that we can only attach it to the wall if you choose my white wood backdrop as that is actually the wall of the studio and I can use tape without damaging it (it would make a mess of my backdrops).  In this picture, we’ve attached it to the wall and if you’re planning on doing that, then it’s a good idea to arrange all the balloons pointing forward if you see what I mean, but if you’re planning to lay it on the floor, you want to create a string that has balloons attached to both the front and back of the tape.

The balloon string needs to be five feet or 1.5 metres long to stretch across the whole of the frame.