At Home Photo Shoot

It's kind of amazing what you can accomplish with a friend who has a nice camera and a little pretty scenery around your house.  I wanted to create a photo shoot to record the last days of my pregnant belly--we did our shoot at 36 weeks.  Our original plan had been to go our to an apple orchard and take advantage of the scenery there, but with limited time we decided to just make use of the area around our house. 

Putting together the photo shoot wasn't difficult.  If you have a decent eye for spacial reasoning, color and design (which most crafty types do) you can come up with some clever shots on your own--or simply search the Internet for "maternity images" and you can see all kinds of ideas.

Here are the props that we used:

• Our countdown chalk board (which usually hangs in our dining room)
• A pumpkin
• A antique quilt
• A mum

That's it.  Then, of course we had a couple of different clothing options, because it makes you feel like a model.  I think it felt a lot like our engagement photo shoot, except with a lot more focus on my belly.  We wanted to look comfortable, happy, and excited.  I think that comes through in the photos.  Check out the results:

This one was taken on our front porch. 

I had found the inspiration for this photo online.  In the photo I found the couple was using a soccer ball, but I thought that being the day before Halloween and that our baby is a fall baby, the pumpkin was cute.

You'd never guess, but many of these shots are taken in a tiny corner of what would be considered our back yard.  Our house actually backs up to a parking lot, and so we have only a 20'x20' space that borders a marsh that would be considered our 'yard', however, with the trees, leaves, and tall grasses, it make a great background.

I had my sister do just a little bit of photo editing on the first shot in the blog...Our day was very cloudy and we didn't really have great light for the shoot, but after she did a little color correcting and added some more shadows, it almost looks like it was sunny!