Sara’s Maternity Pictures

This is my beautiful wife Sara. We’ve been married for almost 9 years and this August are expecting our third child. For the majority of the last 9 years I’ve been mostly a candid photographer. I only captured moments as they happened and always hoped for a good shot without actually creating it. With my new interest in professional photography and actually creating images, as apposed to just taking them, we decided that we would take planned photographs to celebrate what is planned to be Sara’s last pregnancy.

We planned the maternity shoot to take place last Sunday, June 21st. Early in the day I scouted a few locations and planned all of my shots. We planned to start the shoot at 7 PM. The sun was scheduled to go down by 9 PM and the location was to be in an aboretum with heavy tree coverage. I had planned to have the sun peaking through the leaves to give me pockets of bright light in my shots. I also planned to take a shot on a rolling green hill with beautiful sky and puffy white clouds as the background; Sara would be perched on top of the hill as if on the horizon.

Unfortunately we didn’t reach the aboretum until nearly 8 PM! We started out photographing by an old willow tree then moved into the wooded areas only to find that the sun was no longer creating the gorgeous pockets of light that I had seen earlier that afternoon. We attempted a shot by a bridge under the cover of the thick greenery but the ambient exposure was so low that my flashes would have been the entire light source and that wasn’t the look I was going for. Not only that but it had become very humid and the bugs were enjoying us a little more than we were enjoying them.

We decided to come back to the wooded area on another day and instead set out for the hill to create the photograph that I had pre-visualized there. When we got to the hill we were in for another let down. The beautiful clouds from that afternoon were gone and we were left with boring blue sky! Yes. B-o-r-i-n-g.

At that point we were about ready to call it a day but I wanted to get at least one usable shot that I had pre-planned. The last shot, near the parking lot, consisted of lattice work and ivy. My plan was to back light it and have Sara in front of it. We got down to the parking lot and I started setting up my flashes for the shot. I put two bare flashes directly behind the lattice work and set each to 1/2 power. I then put together my Speedlight Pro Kit 6 and attached it to a monopod for Chris to hold over Sara’s face for my main light. After getting the exposure nailed down I got the shot I was after!

We had planned to finish the night at an old abandoned farm West of our home but with the sun nearly set we decided that would have to happen another day. A security guard drove past us, parked near the gate, and closed one door as if to ask us to hurry it up. We packed our gear, put it back in my truck and headed home.

The next day around noon Sara and I loaded the kids into my truck and drove out to the farm to create our photographs. I grabbed my camera and some gear from my truck and we headed into the old barn. Our two kids, Leigh and Ethan, came with us and did a pretty good job of keeping themselves entertained and out of trouble. Once in the barn I took some exposure readings and set up a 42″ shoot through umbrella with two speedlights in order to keep my recycle times down. I set each speedlight at 1/2 power and raised it on the light stand. I then put a white reflector on the ground to stop the brown dirt from reflecting in her skin. I took quite a few shots as Sara and I tried various poses and locations for her to stand near the door.

Once we had our inside shot finished we moved her to the middle of the doorway. With the high noon sun we had very hard light coming in through the doorway, halfway illuminating her face. To stop this I grabbed the reflector and wedged it above her in the doorway. I held the reflector with one hand and shot with the other. Once we had the doorway shot finished we moved to the outside.

The South side of the barn had diagonal slanting planks that I wanted to use as the background of the shot. But, it was in horribly ugly noon sunlight! I didn’t want to compromise here and I knew what I needed to do in order to produce the image I had in my mind. I wanted to beat the sun and cast my own shadows onto the side of the barn while having flattering light on my wife’s face. I went back to the truck to re-gear. I swapped my wide angle lens for a telephoto and grabbed a second light stand. In order to get the hard shadows cast onto the barn and in order to overpower the sun I set each flash up about 6 feet apart and aimed at where Sara would be standing. I zoomed each of them to 50mm which would give me somewhat of a spotlight on her upper body. I added my reflector to the ground, just out of my frame to block the green light that would have been cast from the grass. I took a reading with my Sekonic L358 flash meter and I was at 1/160 F25 ISO 100 with my two flashes combined with the sun. The sun’s exposure alone would have been 1/100 F16 ISO 100 so I was beating it by 2 stops.

We still plan on going back to the arboretum to create the several photographs that I have envisioned inside the wooded area but it will have to wait for another day!