Jungle Themed 1st Birthday Party

Jungle Themed 1st Birthday Party at San Jose Country Club

Hiring a professional photographer for your child’s 1st birthday party is probably one of the smartest things you can do 🙂 Sure, all of your guests will have their cell phones and will snap a bunch of photos – but they will not be close to what a professional photographer can capture. Here are some images from Humayd’s jungle themed 1st birthday party; and the top 5 things that a professional photographer will be able to capture that a cell phone cannot.

1. All of The Important Details

Details shots are one of the most important things that a photographer can capture of your party. You will spend a lot of time and money on all of these little details and these types of images will help tell the “story” of the event. For birthday parties, I like to arrive at least 15 minutes before the start of the event. This allows me to be able to capture all of the detail shots before guests arrive. When your guests start to arrive, I like to focus my attention on you greeting and hugging the guests that start to trickle in 😉

2. Genuine Moments of The Party

Cell phone pictures are good for a few things (selfies, quick photos to immediately upload to social media, etc.) – one of them is not capturing candid and genuine moments. As an Event Photographer, I like to stay in the background and capture images that you and your guests do not even notice I am taking. Shooting images with a telephoto lens helps me to be able to do this. No matter what you are photographing, people generally do not like a camera shoved in their face. That’s why I remain in the background and keep an eye out for fun reactions and moments of you and your guests interacting.

3. Images Regardless of Tricky Lighting Situations

Event Photographers “earn” their money by being able to capture images in tricky lighting situations. At the San Jose Country Club, the area that they hold events in is definitely a little inconvenient lighting wise. The space is bordered by windows – which lets in a lot of light – but the outside is at least 2 times brighter than the lighting on the inside. An experienced Photographer can navigate this situation a lot better than a cell phone 🙂 If you take an image, with your cell phone, where the background is much brighter than the subject, the phone is going to make the subject VERY dark. The next time you have your cell phone – go ahead and test this out. Having the ability to manually set my camera settings will enable me to be able to navigate this lighting situation much better than a cell phone 🙂

4. Images With “Blurry” Backgrounds

In the last couple of years, newer cell phones have a feature called “portrait mode.” It basically tries to create an image where the subject is sharp/in focus and the background is blurry. For photographs, this creates a very aesthetic quality to images because the subject of the image is almost cut out of the background. Professional photographers have cameras and lenses that do this all on their own; and there is a big difference between portraits from a DSLR and a cell phone’s portrait mode!

5. WAY More Images

Even if you REALLY enjoy taking pictures with your phone, taking more than a dozen or so images will be difficult. When I shoot events, I deliver my clients anywhere between 100-150 images an hour. For this event, I delivered around 550 images in the three hours that I covered. I actually took around 1,100 images 🙂 Even if all of your guests took a dozen or so images each, a professional Photographer will be able to take and deliver more photographs.

Hopefully these tips, from Humayd’s jungle themed 1st birthday party, are helpful 🙂 If you are planning a party, I would love to connect with you. Please feel free to send me a quick email at [email protected] or a message through the contact form on my website. Thanks!