Winter Shootout – Maternity/Kids | Riverside
At the end of January I participated in a winter shoot out in Riverside, organized by a couple of local photographers. I LOVE doing shoot outs. They give you the ability to practice photographing things you might not have much experience with (in my case, maternity) without the added pressure of it being a paid session. And of course, I love meeting other local photographers, seeing what they are like, observing them, and learning from them.
The subjects of this particular shoot out were two fold; maternity AND kids. I thought that was neat, since a lot of these shoot outs tend to focus on just one subject.
KIDS SESSION
There were 6 photographers plus the two lead photographers, so it worked out perfectly that one group could shoot the kids while the other shot the maternity session. I chose to photograph the kids first. Kids are more in my wheelhouse being that I shoot a lot of family portraits. Maternity is it’s own subject in itself, just like newborns or head shots. I will never turn down the opportunity to shoot a maternity session, but the focus of my business is primarily seniors and family, so I chose to start with the children.
They were so cute. I mean ADORABLE! The photographers had arranged for them to be wearing flower crowns, matching ivory dresses, and angel wings. We were all hoping that it would be snowing for our shoot out, but it wasn’t. Still, it was cold though. We were all impressed with the girls – they didn’t complain once.
MATERNITY SESSION
After about 30 minutes, we switched. The photographers had arranged for the model to be wearing a dress from a local couture shop. It was a skin tight, green velvet, mermaid dress with tons of tulle on the bottom. It may sound odd in description, but in person I think our model wore it very well – it was very pretty on her and in the environment.
Our model was a total natural – she was gorgeous, and it totally looked like she could have done this for a living. We didn’t have to give her any direction at all. She just nailed all the poses and we clicked away! At this point, she had been pregnant, out in the cold, for nearly an hour. She said she was freezing, but it sure didn’t look like it! And even though I thought the dress was beautiful, I did really want to get close up shots too, since that’s more my style. In the end, I’m very happy I got both.
POST PROCESSING
Something I have wanted to do for a long time was manipulate a photo to add snow and make it look like winter. Near the end of the session, I grabbed some awesome images of the girls that I ended up using for several manipulations. I did create some snow ones for our maternity model, but by that point I was itching to try something else since I had just spent so much time working with snow. I ended up finding a beautiful picture of some ruins with a window and composited her into that.
In the end, this was time well invested, despite the cold. By the time I got back to my car, I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes. It was also getting hard to speak – it felt like my lips were freezing! I blasted the heat the entire way home and still couldn’t totally warm up 🙂
xoxo
Lauren