Yesterday I had the great joy of making baby bump photos for a young friend of mine. What a joy it was! I got to play with some new toys (a portable backdrop and 2 clip-on utility lights that I bought at the hardware store) and I got to make photographs of an amazingly sweet time in a young family’s life.
It doesn’t get much better than this!
Twice postponed because of my lingering cold, the stars finally aligned Sunday morning and we spent about an hour and a half capturing memories. I did lots of research and planning before the photo shoot and even created a Pinterest gallery of interesting baby bump photo ideas to study ahead of time, as well as spending a lot of time studying Anne Geddes portraits of pregnant women in the beautiful book Beginnings.
Despite the cramped space and limited light, we were able to shoe-horn in my new backdrop at a 90-degree angle to a large window in their living room. I clamped the utility lights to my tripods for additional light and set the ISO in my camera up to 3200 and the F-stop to 5.6 in order to get the exposure time short enough for hand-holding my camera.
I also brought a large piece of black velvet to use as a backdrop for a few shots, and a beautiful large piece of organza to play with.
I ended up taking most of the shots from down low, kneeling so that I could frame the shot within the confines of the 5’x7′ backdrop. It worked better than I expected.
The most challenging part of the photo shoot was engaging the 2 kids long enough to get shots of them with mom, and with mom and dad. I had forgotten how lively and energetic two and four year olds are.
As I reviewed the shots afterwards, I thought of lots of things I would do differently. I always find that there is so much to learn from my mistakes. They help me broaden my attention. The next time I will hopefully think of several of the things I learned before making the same mistake again!
Here are a few more of the shots from our photo shoot (shared with permission from the family).
May you walk in beauty.
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