Pickle Princess | 5 Year Old Birthday Photoshoot
The story of how a fun idea for a Pickle Princess photoshoot turned into a Viral IG reel…
Every year for Little Boo’s birthday we pick a theme for her birthday photoshoot centered around something she’s interested in or something she loves. We were discussing how pickles are one of her favorite foods and maybe we should pick that as a theme. Once she heard the idea, she was 100% on board! The idea for our Pickle Princess photoshoot was off to a good start! I wasn’t exactly sure how we would carry it off, but I knew inspiration would eventually strike.
The first step was reaching out to Chante from My Darling Emma, a custom order handcrafted clothing boutique for photographers, to make sure she could create the perfect dress. I shouldn’t have worried! We originally asked if the dress could be purple fabric, since that’s her favorite color, but Chante didn’t find anything that would go with the adorable pickle patch she found. Originally the design for the dress was totally different than the final product and I think Chante was a little nervous I wouldn’t like it, but as with everything she creates, it was perfection!
Ok, now the backdrop. It was only a couple days before the shoot that I actually figured out what I wanted to do. I pulled inspiration from a few different places (A little bit of Norman Rockwell, a little bit of Meg Loeks and a whole lot of me!) and came up with a sketch of what I wanted to do. I sent my husband to the store and told him to buy at least 20 jars of different pickles but to mostly get Vlasic and Mt. Olive pickles cuz the jar colors matched the theme. He was skeptical at first and even got comments at the store asking why he needed so many pickle jars, but he trusted Pickle Princess vision!
In my original sketch for the Pickle Princess shoot, the flowers were in little bud vases, but as I set up the shelves they didn’t fit so I went with plan B and just laid them down. I actually like how it turned out, because in the vases, it would have been too linear. We used the reclaimed barnwood I use for my studio flooring as the shelves and then paint cans as the spacers in between. Between the Pickle Princess dress and the pickles in the background, we had a nice amount of pickles!
During the photoshoot, Little Boo was being her crazy adorable self and my husband took a few behind the scenes videos. I thought they were pretty cute and decided to post one as a reel. I found the perfect pickle song on IG thanks to Jordan Smart and posted the reel. At first it went semi-viral for me at least and had around 40,000 views. To me, that was crazy! Fast forward to a few weeks ago (a month after I had posted the reel) and all of a sudden the reel was blowing up! I was getting hundreds of likes per minute and I couldn’t keep up with the comments and shares! Apparently people liked the Pickle Princess, lol!
If you’re interested in checking out the reel here is the link
And here are the final results of our Pickle Princess photoshoot…
