How to Light Maternity Photography - how to pose and light this image
This is the gorgeous Tianna Jarrett-Williams, a fellow photographer, who I kidnapped to demonstrate how to light maternity when there was a training session going on at my studio in Preston, Lancashire. This was created and shot literally in a five minutes.
How did I create this?
So the how is very simple, feathered 135 octobox as key light, 70 deep box as an accent. The ratio would be smaller one at 1 stop less, in hindsight a 1/3 rd less than that would have been even better. The feathering on the key is to just graze that soft light across the front of the bump and also pick out those gorgeous cheekbones, the accent is to prevent total loss of hair against the dark grey background. Camera height is halfway to prevent any distortion and shot on the 85mm at f5.6, iso 50.
Why I shot it like this
I am going to talk about not just the shot but to the whole final image presentation.
The pose is very simple, the dress was a touch as it was not for maternity, so wouldn’t fasten at the back. This meant I was a little limited as to what I could do. Keeping it very simple with a top and bottom bump hand set up , cheeky angle on the head just looking beyond bump to prevent neck compression then probably said something cheeky to get the expression (Tianna and I are friends so I can get away with it, judge your client before trying it!). The crop is just a simple half length as the dress fit better that way.
SO, into PS after a simple raw conversion and then skin tidy , some dodge and burn to really pop the cheek bones and localised sharpening to bring out the details. Now this dress I have shot probably 20 times and try and make it different so popped it into alien skin to give a colour grading which you see here ( no idea which preset, probably a mix of 2 or 3 ). A vignette was added as I prefer to shoot with a large light source for the quality of light on subject which causes background spill which I can then pull down with a curves vignette. That was the retouch finished but I liked the tones and cohesive nature of this so felt the stroke line and border added to the final presentation, the colours of both are sampled from the image to make the tonal range flow through it all.
That’s it really. A simple but effective shot .
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