m.sawyer photography

a slew of firsts

A few weeks ago, my friend Cody asked me about shooting some maternity photos for her. She was about 8 months pregnant at the time, so there wasn’t much time for pondering the decision. I told her I would consider it but that it would absolutely be experimental. I had never done maternity shots before. 

So I spent the following week attempting to find good maternity photos for reference. Granted, I pretty much only looked on Flickr, but Flickr’s so easy to use and search, and I like their built-in content filters. What I found was a little shocking: I found great disdain for almost every maternity photo I saw, though I couldn’t quite put my reasoning into words. And then I found this photo. I was instantly inspired by it and it didn’t offend me in any way. I began to realize that the only maternity photos I found artistically inspiring, genuine, and interesting were almost all nude. 

This presented a problem. I’d also never photographed a nude person. And I was sure that Cody (or at least her husband) would not be interested in doing such a shoot. Besides it seemed so easy for me to botch such a sensitive project. So the decision was pretty much made at that point. Or so I thought.

I met up with Cody again later and explained all of this to her. But she surprised me by actually being quite open to the idea. What a brave woman! It turns out her husband was as well. Now I had to scramble and figure out how to accomplish such a shoot. Next challenge: lighting.

So far I have mostly done portraits in natural light (or natural+reflector light) outdoors. For obvious reasons I couldn’t really pull this off unless we went way out in the country. Plus I wanted to use extremely heavy shadows that were meticulously placed. For that I would need studio lighting. Another first for me. 

My friend Travis Hall was kind enough to let me borrow an AlienBees monolight and a couple of large softboxes to try out. I had a couple of hours to set the light up in my living room and practice. I’ve been a long-time fan of the Strobist blog and have probably learned most of what I know about off-camera lighting from there. It still takes a lot of practice and experience though to master the subject. Nevertheless I was able to finally figure out an approximate lighting setup that I wanted to use for Cody.

The actual shoot went incredibly well. I setup the large softbox angling down and towards the back of the room behind Cody, and the ambient light coming through sliding glass doors (and covered by a white sheet) was pretty low but very soft. I started out with my Canon and a 35mm/1.4L lens (highly recommended lens by the way) to warm up for my primary technical goal: to capture shots with my medium format cameras. That part went quite well too, except for the fact that, for some unknown reason, I metered based on the highlights instead of the shadows. As a result I significantly underexposed most of the shots. Thankfully black and white film has awesome dynamic range and exposure latitude and I was able to recover enough of the shadows in post. So the resulting photos were probably a little more “film noir” and contrasty than I had anticipated. But perhaps that’s exactly what I needed anyway.

update: I made the photo clickable, in case you want to see the rest of the set.