A Maternity Shoot that Didn't Go as Planned

Maternity shoots are a lot of fun, but it’s also way more intense than regular portrait shoots—in a regular portrait shoot, if you mess up, you can try again. For maternity shoots, you get one chance to get it right. Clients trust you in capturing their special moment, and you don’t want to let them down. Here are a few lessons I learned from my recent shoot with Shwetha and her family.

It was a cloudy day—and though cloudy days are great for portrait shoots—this time the light was a little challenging to work with during the first hour of the shoot. I thought I was going home with no keepers. But when it got darker and the corridor lights came on, to my surprise, the light changed dramatically. Stanford is so beautiful in the late evening. It’s like a scene from Prince of Persia (if you remember the game from the 90s). I decided to go a little overtime to get more of those ambient shots. Unfortunately, it was a really cold day and I didn’t realize how cold it was for Shwetha because, well, I was wearing two jackets. That shot you see with the rays coming through the arch—we spent about 40 minutes trying to get that shot right, but she was freezing to death the whole time and was pretty much ready to go home. Lesson learned—have empathy! Don’t just think of your shots. Think about your clients. They are dressed up for the shoot. They aren’t wearing the kind of warm clothes you might be wearing. It’s easy to forget your clients’ needs when you are so focused on your shots.

Another lesson: stay open-minded and be flexible with your strategy. I went in with the idea of shooting in natural light. Having shot at Stanford before, I knew the spots that get nice directional lighting around sunset time. But the shoot turned out to be more of an indoor-ish shoot—it was well past sunset and quite dark—which meant I had to re-think all my spots. Stanford is a huge campus and having to think of new spots on the fly can be overwhelming. But this is where it’s important to keep your ideas flexible, and not set on stone. When things don’t go the way you had planned, you might feel a little in denial at first, but being flexible with yourself and quickly re-strategizing could save the day.

More photos here: swamiphotography.com/shwetha

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