Truth Behind the Photo: Blogger Party Edition

DIY blogland is all about beautiful (and sometimes way overexposed) photos, so we do our best to deliver. Sure we share grainy cell phone pictures taken at night in the basement more often than other bloggers seem to, but we also do try to make things look pretty.

Getting these shots isn’t always easy, though — we don’t actually live in pristine white homes where we’re frequently home during daylight hours, the sunlight is always perfectly diffused, and the rooms are expansive enough to get any angle you want. No, we live in places like this:

But since this is Plaster & Disaster, we like to capitalize on the fact that you expect us to be honest with you, and turn that into humorous blog fodder. That’s why one of our favorite recurring posts is “truth behind the photo,” where we show you the ridiculous things we do to get photos for this here blog.

Like that time Sage climbed up a ladder outside her house in order to photograph the shelves in her study straight-on:

Or the time Naomi pretended that her kitchen floor was actually her fridge in order to make magnets look pretty.

In that spirit, fresh off of the amazing and very-blogger party we threw a few weeks ago to celebrate our blog anniversary, we wanted to share a bit more about what was actually going on.

First off, we’d originally planned our blog anniversary celebration to take place a week earlier (the week of our actual anniversary…), but while on vacation visiting family for the holidays, Naomi got horrendously sick. We were planning to get together the day after she got back to do all the projects for our anniversary posts, but it was obvious that she should be resting in bed, not trying to make mocktails and cookies. We were able to reschedule for a week later and push our posts schedule by a week.

But it was still a crunch, because in these parts the sun sets at approximately 4:30pm…and the cardinal rule of Good Photography is that you need natural light. By the time we finished brainstorming all our amazing projects and picked up supplies, it was like 3pm and the race was on to do a new photoshoot for our profile picture, make our ridiculous crafts, and then photograph them before the sun set.

It was a little dark (and a lot awkward and messy) in Sage’s living room for our profile picture photoshoot:

Naomi made her “my lips are smiling but I am currently plotting my revenge on you” face:

And then promptly had her revenge by making Sage do this:

Fortunately the bad lighting and mess was nothing that cropping and overexposing the picture couldn’t take care of. For instance, here’s this original photo that makes you wonder why two grown women subjected themselves to this pain:

And the edited version that makes you think we’re real bloggers:

Things started to get really frantic as we prepared the food and decor for our “dinner party” (there was neither dinner nor partying). We had about 45 minutes to inflate and paint balloons, decorate cookies, come up with and execute a hilarious and delicious-looking mocktail, set-up our party scene, and photograph every step along the way. There was a lot of frantic running around.

Fortunately we had Naomi’s white plywood backdrops in order to make this scene:

Look like this:

By the the time we finished our projects, the sun was almost down, so Naomi finished setting the table while Sage got the camera set up for a loooooong exposure.

Obligatory test shots (in which the exposure was so long that Naomi looks like a ghost) ensued:

And you would never guess that the room actually looked like this:

When we managed to snap this final picture:

The long exposure (coupled with some light editing) is really a miracle-worker, especially in the Northeast during the winter when it’s basically always dark.

We hope this doesn’t undermine how impressed you were with our beautiful party (if anything it should make you respect us even more for somehow managing to pull this off despite having been sidelined by the plague and then clearly having started way too late in the day)!