Theme parties are great fun and inspire your creativity. I was asked to photograph a dog birthday party. Yes, dogs have birthday parties too—they even have theme birthday parties. The theme of this particular party was “Midsummer Night”.

Of course, the first place to start is Google and I found a lot of great inspiration. Next, I started looking for backdrops and found several very inexpensive one that seemed perfect.

The next step: create the props. I needed to create a woodland scene, but how to have tree logs and stumps that I could easily transport and carry to the venue by myself? I could find real logs in the area, but I would never be able to get them in and out of a small restaurant space where the party was going to be held. I researched and found inspiration on the internet for making prop trees and logs. Perfect! All I needed were a couple of old pails, cans of spray foam insulation, a tube cement form from Home Depot, tape, cardboard, newspaper, some brown wrapping paper, glue and a bit of paint.

I created two tree stumps using pails as the foundation of the form. Using tape and newspaper I created the forms of the roots coming from the tree, and covered them with the spray foam insulation, careful to make vertical lines that followed the look of tree bark. The roots gave me a little bit of a problem because the foam would shrink causing the roots to look like they were floating above the ground. I just had to add a couple of layers to the bottom and then cut the bottoms flat and level and the problem was solved. I also trimmed the excess foam off the top to make the top of the stumps flat as well.