Maternity Portraits and Silhouettes

Saturday, I tried out a few new things: studio-style maternity photography and silhouettes. As you can see, both turned out pretty well! My model and her husband agreed to pose for silhouettes (something I've been doing location scouting for recently), and I agreed to try some studio-style maternity portraits.

First, we did the silhouettes at Alpharetta High School. It's an ideal location for this because the whole complex is built on levels. I stand down on one level while my models pose on the level above. That way, I shoot up from the bottom of the hill and get beautiful silhouettes against a setting-sun sky. I was inspired by a series of maternity silhouettes by Colorado-area photographer Barb Lattin at Perfectly Natural Photography. We belong to the same email group, and she gave some great tips on how to do silhouettes. Thanks, Barb!

The studio-style maternity portraits were an entirely different matter. I am not a studio photographer, so I don't own mono or strobe lights. However, I'm an avid listener of StudioLighting.net's LightSource podcast. So I've learned a lot about studio lighting and do-it-yourself set-ups from podcast episodes.

To create these shots, I knew we would need some powerful lights and a black background. So, Jacob and I rigged a lamp stand with 5 mini halogen lights! We then bounced the light off of a bedroom wall so that we wouldn't have harsh shadows behind the model. I also had to adjust the exposure compensation on the camera so that the charcoal-colored material we draped in the background would go completely black.

After an hour of shooting silhouettes, we spend the next two hours getting the rest of the shots. Whew! I have new respect for studio photographers. Not only was set-up time drawn out, but each shot took meticulous posing and each outfit change made for a longer shoot. Despite all this, my model and I had a great time, and we were delighted with the results.

Candid outdoor shoots are my real love however. They are fun and fast and spontaneous. In fact, I'm positively glowing from the praise a few of our clients blogged about on their sites. One mom wrote a whole description about our shoot on her 3 Cute Kids blog. (Check out more mom reactions from that shoot at Urban Adventures and Adam, Lisa, and Ellie.) Another mom posted some additional pictures from a family photo shoot I did the week before. I'm also seeing some of my work pop up on Facebook as clients take advantage of the low resolution image files I include on the CD for online sharing. When clients post their pictures online and tell others about us, it's about the best compliment we could recieve. Thank you!