Best Guidelines on Maternity and Pregnancy Photography for Photographers

Are you a photographer? Going to shoot maternity photographs? At night, before your photo session, this content can be useful for you as preparation for pregnancy photography. Here we have tried to cover all the necessary tips and tricks for mom-to-be photo shooting. If you read it, you will find A-Z maternity photo session instructions that will take your photography experience to the next level. If you go through it in detail, you will get a touch of photo editing suggestions that we have provided from our long image manipulation experience.

As the clients of maternity photography can check out the real-time results, your photo shooting should be near perfect regarding all things. You should be concerned about attire, poses, emotion, gear, location, timing, and more so that at your first attempt, you can win the pregnant photography client’s hearts. This guideline can help you to get the best belly bump mom photos.

13 Best Maternity Photography Tips

Maternity photo shooting is all about perfectly posing and wearing suitable attire. So, we are presenting here some tips for getting quality maternity and pregnancy photos for you.

1. Take Away Mom Alone

Whenever you are taking maternity photographs, take away the mom from other family members. Make her alone to focus on the target- the belly bump. Ask her to relax. To focus on the subject, try anything while mom posing- tell her keeping hands on her belly, looking at you, at her foot, shoulder, left or right side down, or away from the camera lens.

Tell her to pose at different angles, bend one leg, shift weight, and get relaxed. This way will give you the advantage to shoot meaningful maternity photos.

Image Source: Pixabay

2. Let Dad Play With the Belly

To make it more fun and enjoyable, ask dad to involve with the photograph. Take him to kneel down before the belly and let him hold the baby bump belly. Ask him to have fun speaking with the baby inside and listening to the baby’s fun also. If the husband has any special pose, let him do it.

You can suggest other poses like holding the belly from behind. As a professional photographer, practice humbleness and make family members feel important in making part of the maternity photo frame.

3. Funny Props and Accessories

Maternity photography can be great fun if the parents know the baby’s gender. They are so much excited to meet their baby soon and so, they do many things while photo shooting.

To increase the pregnant photography aesthetic, as a photographer, you can suggest the new parents keep funny props or accessories inside the photo frame. Knowing the gender of the baby, you can suggest taking tiny shoes, dresses, dolls, and other baby-playing accessories.

If the parents want to get other props with them while posing, let them. In short, manage anything to make maternity photography enjoyable for both you and your clients.

4. Wardrobe or Dresses

For any photography, the shutterbugs should recommend that clients carry more than one dress or accessories. Tell the mom to wear pretty tight jeans, shirts, and other upper dresses. They will help to see the bump of the belly. If you use a belt around the belly, it also highlights the bump.

To get the best maternity photo, sometimes the mom may bare her belly or you can suggest her. Try to make her wear different dresses while taking photos. Use dresses that contrast the background and ensure the dresses are comfortable for mom.

5. Placement of Legs and Hands

You know that maternity photography is all about the bump belly. So, try to throw focus on it, and to do that there is a role for the placement of hands and legs rightly. You can focus bump by placing your hands below and on the upper area of the belly. Mom can also keep her hands around the belly.

If she wants, she can keep other glossy stuff in her hands. You can also suggest the mom bend onward or backward placing her legs. Do it carefully if she is wearing high heels.

If she feels uncomfortable, just tell her to stand relaxed normally as she does. In that case, change your position and angle to get the right belly bump.

6. Include Older Siblings (Toddlers)

Photo posing is such an amazing thing that everybody, no matter whether he/she is older or younger, loves it. As an experienced maternity photographer, keep in mind many other things to make pregnancy photos aesthetically outstanding. While mom is posing, let other people be part of it.

Allow the older siblings to get with mom and let them hold, touch, and kiss the bumped belly. Make the photography session more natural by playing and laughing around the mom.

7. Different Poses for Different Bodies

Different bodies are comfortable for different poses. You have to keep in mind the ease of the moms. Best images come out of the utmost comfortable poses. Ask poses from the moms what they feel comfortable and like. While posing ask them to wear the best dresses that make them feel at ease. Be aware of the happy expression that plays on their faces.

Allow them to enjoy the environment, nature, and poses that they are comfortable with. Don’t allow them to pose in any risky place like a rocky mountain, or a coastal area, and choose photography places near the residence. Try to come back before setting the sun and don’t go in severe cold.

8. Don’t Forget to Play and Fun

Successful photographers love to play with situations and create a funny and enjoyable photographic environment before taking shots. While asking for maternity photo posing, request your client, we mean the mom to play and have fun with her husband or siblings.

It is necessary to get a comfortable photography moment for stunning pregnant photos. Ask the mom to gossip, have fun, laugh, dance, and embrace the Dad or siblings. It will help get candid pregnant photos of the bump-belly mom.

9. Keeps Arms and Body Away From the Body

The positioning of hands during photography is essential and while you are taking maternity photos, it is too crucial. Sometimes inappropriate hand positioning ruins photo quality. In case of belly bump mom photography, ask them to keep hands around the belly that will get highlighted for this.

She can keep her hand behind while she is sitting. She also can keep upward while posing standing leaning her legs back to get focused on the belly and many other hand positionings can help to get better quality mom photographs with the baby inside the belly.

10. Look Upwards

While taking maternity photos, ask your client to look high so that you can focus only on the bumped belly keeping other swelling body parts apart like breasts.

To get such images, you have to stand up on any stool or rock and let the mom below. You can do so by sitting the mom on the ground. Request the dad to be with the mom to create a more natural situation.

11. Bring the Couple Closer Together

Dad may feel hesitant while getting closer to mom. Give them time to be close, to play and have fun, to gossip and dance, and more. If they want, include older siblings and other people or elements.

Do anything to make the dreamy photographic moment. You can suggest to them from your experience. Show some of the images as samples so that they can understand how they should be closed.

12. Use a Drone

To produce top-notch quality and story-based maternity photos, we recommend a bonus to use a drone to get long exposure from a very high position. Not only photographs, but even you can also shoot videos of a mom and her family members to create a short film.

If your clients are ambitious and desire to get high-budget photo and video shooting sessions, talk about using drones for maternity photography and video.

You must be appreciated by the clients if you can use drones for maternity photos and show them drone photos. It is pretty much costlier, but the happy-to-be-parents couple usually doesn’t think to spend if they can afford it. So, propose them drone photo shooting.

13. Emotion

Images that lack emotion suffer from a natural maternity look and cannot touch the viewers’ attention. If the cameraman can hold the real-time emotions of his clients, that means he is serious about his photography profession. Considering maternity photography, mom’s and dad’s combined emotions play a crucial role to get stunning pregnancy images.

As a photographer, you always should be aware of the mingling of the couple’s happy emotions. Ask them to be closer, talk about happy moments they plan to spend with the upcoming baby, laugh at the photography golden time, etc., and thus, you can expect emotional and love-making photographs. Try to focus on emotions and feelings.

Bonus Tips

Many other poses can be applied out there for high-quality maternity images. If the belly bump is bigger than average, you can try to have straight-on-standing mom images. Recommend she wears a tight top to vivify the swelling.

For getting more attention on the bump, request her to place her hands around it. If you are going to shoot a couple of images, you can ask them to sit on hip-leaning legs, but be careful of their comfort.

Maternity Photography Gears

High-end maternity photography like other product photography mostly depends on the use of good quality photography gear. As a photographer, you have to make impressed the mom-to-be by providing the best quality pregnant images.

So you cannot but use the best photoshoot kit for high-quality new mom photos. Here we are providing a list of mom photography gear, you can utilize these:

Location

Expert maternity photographers spend time concentrating on photography locations. For perfect pregnant photos, choosing a suitable location is, no doubt, very essential. You should have a pre-made list of beautiful photography locations as a professional photographer.

You can enlist beautiful forest areas, mountains, rocky hill tracks, sea-beach or coastal areas, deserts, urban buildings and structures, gardens or parks, home or indoor studios, and many more in your notebook.

If you search for pregnant photos, amazingly you will see, all the images are taken in the mentioned areas.

Best Time to Take Maternity Photography

Actually, there is no fixed time for taking pregnant photography. The best photographs may come at any time. So, you can take maternity photos anytime using daylight.

To get the best exposure, capture images at board daylight. You can utilize photography golden hour (just after rising the sun and just before setting the sun) for golden tint color in the images.

However, it is about time. Now you may think when or in what condition of the belly we should take mom images. If you want to show a perfect belly bump, you have to take images when she is pregnant at 7-8 months.

It is an ideal time for maternity photography. If your clients want to capture every month for every change, you can take images from the beginning of pregnancy.

You can also check out some posts that may help you:

Photography hacks for babies and toddlers

Macro photography ideas, hacks & tricks

Best Newborn Photography Tips

Wrap-up

These are all the maternity photography tips we planned and designed for you. But still, there is something more to say to you for producing high-quality maternity photos.

As an expert photographer, you know that only photography cannot generate desired quality photos. More or less they need photo editing and retouching services. There are lots of maternity image editing services like photo retouching, color correction, exposure correction, object removing or adding from the background, and many other services. You can apply these photo editing techniques in Photoshop for producing outstanding maternity images.