My First Baby Bump Portraits

I’ve always known that I’ve wanted to do baby bump portraits but without having done one comes the fear that I may not be able to do them justice. Well I no longer have that fear.

Last week I had a fantastic photo shoot with my good friend Zoe. I’m sure it helped to do this first with a friend as it did involve a little experimenting and a little nudity which for me anyway needed a little getting used to. Zoe on the other hand didn’t seem to have a problem at all. Why is it always the clothed person who is more uncomfortable than the unclothed.

In order to ease our way into the shoot I opted for the fully clothed poses to start with. And we gradually worked our way down to the bare essentials. This is a technique I will employ for all future shoots as well seeing as it seemed to ease us in quite nicely. By the time we made it to totally nude I hardly even noticed. Not that all baby bump photos need to go this far though.

We actually ended up finishing off with clothed poses. For the final set I switched to the white background. In this case I played around with the lighting again. Rather than create very bright (high key) images I decided not to light the background so as to get something somewhere in between. As it turns out I quite like the look of these images too and plan on using this technique a lot more in future. Particularly in the new studio.

This turned out to be an experience I am so glad to have had. I started out being very nervous, wondering if I would be able to produce something artistic and appealing. And as with most women, the shoot started off with the words ‘I hate pictures of myself’ which of course put even more pressure on me. But with each pose I was able to produce something both myself and Zoe were proud of. The experimenting really paid off.

Now I can’t wait to have another opportunity to do the same. And to have another opportunity to do more experimenting because I can now see that being the key to continual and long term success as a skilled photographer.