Day 23-Maternity

This past Saturday, I shot my first official maternity session.

I was not looking forward to it.

I went so far as to entertain ideas of calling and canceling or hoping that the snow we'd been getting would be a big enough deterrent that they wouldn't risk the hour drive. It didn't help that I was in a snippy mood and had gotten sick the night before.

Nonetheless, I spent an hour and a half getting my 'studio' ready and about 5 rushed minutes attempting to create dramatic lighting with my sister sitting in.

Marsha & Matt arrived by their 1pm appointment and as soon as I met them and showed them downstairs my fears were just about gone.

I'm a big self doubter.

The problem, or not so much that as an inconvenience, with maternity shoots is that there's tons of room for creativity, but no one seems to be utilizing it. I poured over pages and pages of maternity shots thru Google and Flickr and never found anything I hadn't seen a million times before. I wanted to offer them something unique, not to just make the generic-what everyone else does-photos.

Still, I had asked her to send me a few ideas of what she was looking for before the shoot and I think we hit on those pretty well.

Below you'll see a few photos that I've edited already. You'll notice that the faces/heads of the couple are cut off a lot. Somehow in editing I realized how much I had been shooting that way and found I liked it. After all, the photos aren't just about mom & dad. There's a baby in the picture and I'd like to focus a little more on its presence.

Problems I ran into:

• I don't have a lot of studio space so doing lighting effectively or shooting anything bigger than a close up was a little difficult.
• I need a dressing area.
• My basement is freezing! I can plug a heater in but I blow fuses over and over again.
• Clients are in my 'studio' for at least 2 hours and while I have a little table with some of my prints on it, there's not much in the way of self advertising for them to look at while they wait.
• We end the shoot, they pay, thank me and then leave. I have to get in the habit of sitting them down, showing them products and deals and stuff that I can offer them in addition to buying digital files.
• I need to keep a checklist of what the client wants and what I want so that I make sure I hit all those ideas.
• When I post unedited photos for them to look at and go thru, they tell me what numbers they like. But then I have to go in and figure out what number matches what image I have on my computer to edit. It's a long process. I need to fix that.
• Making the photos NOT look like engagement photos