Our DIY Maternity Photos

We took our maternity photos at 28 weeks (on our babymoon) and 30 weeks (in our neighborhood). We would have loved to have some professionally taken, but with all the baby gear we were purchasing we decided it was best to save our money for the newborn photos to be professionally done. Crazy to think soon we will be posting pictures of our bebe! Hope you like 'em!

Here are some of my tips for others who want to take their own pictures:

 - Sunrise and sunset have the best lighting for outdoor pictures, and natural lighting is much easier than figuring it out indoors...so just do that.
 - If the light does get too harsh, find trees our something that provides shade. We only have one picture in the cotton fields because (as you can tell) the lighting was so harsh it created intense shadows and didn't flatter my skin tone.
 - We printed out a page of the poses we liked so we could just copy them quickly...didn't waste our good light and didn't have to think too much (which is good when you are the photographer and model)
 - Know your camera. I am still a beginner with mine so I used a guide setting (for now)that helped me pick what I wanted based on the lighting. *We did have trouble keeping ourselves in focus while blurring the background though (advice welcomed).
 - When you can control it; think of angles, getting in close, and using the sun to your advantage...and then there is always photoshop!

 What we used:
 - Nikon D3100 camera (used the self timer on the ones with both of us)
 - Camera tripod
 - Sunrise
 - Whatever props you want
 - Photoshop
        - Features used: Crop, levels, shadow/highlight, curves, brightness/contrast, exposure, vibrance, black    and white, color balance, photo filters, paint brush, clone, healing brush, blur, opacity, smart sharpen, gaussian blur, lens flare, layers, and lens correction vignette. (when needed...based on the photo)
        - Make sure you save your original file and then a new one for editing so you are not scared to play with these features...and duplicating layers as you edit different features helps to be able to turn them on/off and see changes quickly.