Jude's Trip Around the Universe — 1st Birthday Long Beach

The pastel-galaxy palette — baby pink, green, yellow, light purple, peach — pulled the space theme out of the obvious dark-blue-with-silver-stars trap that nearly every space-themed first birthday lands in. A one-year-old's birthday is photographed at close range with a lot of skin tones in the frame, and a dark-saturated palette would have killed the warmth of those shots. I shaped the five tones to sit close in value so no single color dominated, and to play well against the home's natural light without needing supplemental fill.

The composition was layered. The star-scattered backdrop carried the headline surface, with vinyl-cut stars applied across the panel face at irregular scatter so the eye read distribution rather than pattern. A 4ft light-up number one anchored the floor in front of the panel — the single brightest object in the install, sized for the toddler in the chair and for the camera six feet back. A wooden sun cutout sat at the panel's edge as the warm-tone counterweight; planet balloons floated alongside on staggered heights, latex-shaped rather than printed; and an astronaut girl photo cutout occupied the panel's left side as the personalization element. Organic garland in the full five-tone palette spilled across the panel's top edge and softened the rectangular geometry.

The wooden sun cutout was a deliberate material break from the latex-and-foil mix — natural wood photographs as warm depth in a way no painted prop does, and it gave the install a keepsake object the family could carry into Jude's room afterward. Every fabricated piece — the panel, the vinyl stars, the wooden sun, the astronaut cutout — was built by my team in our studio so the proportions matched a one-year-old's seated height for cake-cutting shots.

A private home in Long Beach gives natural light through windows but no overhead control, which is why the pastel palette earned its placement. Bright daylight would have blown out a dark space-theme install, but pastel tones layered against the home's wash and gained the soft separation a first-birthday photoshoot needs. I sized the panel and the number one to a single sightline against the room's brightest window-facing wall and kept the rest of the install from spilling into back-lit space.

The choice that mattered most was treating the space theme as a palette problem rather than a graphic one — and the install reads as a galaxy without ever printing one.