We did our own Maternity photos….YIKES

As I entered my 9th month of pregnancy, it suddenly dawned on me that we hadn’t even had any maternity pictures done. This was so disturbing for me because a) I was so excited to have them done from the moment we found out the great news and b) Im a photographer…I encourage every pregnant woman to document this time in their lives through photos.

After we did some research, we had hesitations. This was our first baby and we had no idea about what the financial implications of a baby would be, so we thought we would save some money and do our own maternity photo’s…Yikes! So this is what we did…. 1. I set up my home studio 2. Loaded Maple (my camera) on the tripod 3. Set the continuous trigger to 100×10  4. Posed.

As we started the shoot we were all uncomfortable. No one knew where to look and poor Hamish thought he should be in every single picture. After about an hour we both chilled out a bit and had some fun with the shoot. But these were the problems we ran into…

a) Because there was no one telling us where to look and what to do, we felt really awkward. The most comfortable thing to do was to just stare at each other or at the belly. We have a lot of these shots…

b) Hamish, our very lovable dog, tried to get into every single shot. This one was supposed to be of just me….

c) It was hard to make technical adjustments when we were more concerned about making the right pose. I ended up shooting over 400 shots and we really only got 200 shots that were useable.

d) Somehow, editing photos of yourself becomes very irritating; it is so easy to pick every picture apart and over edit pictures trying to make them look completely different than your actual image.

Overall, I was really glad we did our own maternity photo’s, but we opted for having Dragonfly Photography and the very talented Rebecca Lipaitt-Long do our newborn/family portraits.