There is SO much that I want to say about this past weekend and about this session back in Philadelphia. 🙂 But I am getting caught up on allllll of the things I am behind on due to back to back trips! I will say what I want to say in the post on this gorgeous mama’s baby shower coming up tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy this truly stunning mama-to-be.
I have known Dani what seems like forever now. I knew her before we moved to RI and she is by far my closest friend here. I’ve done several sessions with her now – her first maternity with her daughter, their newborn session and then a family session last fall. So if she looks familiar, well, she’s been on here a lot. 😉 Now she is pregnant again and they are expecting a little BOY anytime in the next few weeks yay!! 🙂 I started bugging her early on about planning her maternity session. Her complaint? She thinks winter maternity clothes are ugly. HA! Take a look at these and see just how “awful” she looks.
Truly one of the most breathtakingly beautiful pregnant women ever, I think. 🙂 And before we all hate how amazing she looks at 36 weeks it is very important to know that she is also a runner and very health conscious. She has run (I believe) three half marathons this pregnancy or two halves and one full – including a half at 28 weeks!! 
And being the great friend that she is, we did some realllllly funny stuff. Most of it is going to stay with just her in the fear that someone would think it was real and submit it to Awkward Family Photos. But here’s just a little tiny hint. This is just the tip of the iceberg 😉
There is something about a maternity session. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. There is just something I love. Capturing that last period of time before this little tiny human being arrives; the happiness, the excitement. All of that rolled together just makes me love them. And Saturday morning’s session was all of that and more. These two are SO excited for their new little guy to join them. There was so much laughter and smiling and just excitement. It takes about 30 seconds of being around them before you know. 🙂 And they are going to make SUCH great parents when he gets here. I cannot wait to meet him!
A bit of blunt honesty time here. I’ll let you in on a little secret most photographers have. I sometimes really don’t like my work and get really bored with what I do (the work I produce, not the job itself). It’s true. I’m not being overly dramatic or self-deprecating. I really do, at times, dislike what I have done. I’ll love a session for a month or two. And then I’ll go back and it just won’t do it for me anymore. All I can see is what I did wrong or how I could have done something differently. And yes, the opposite is also true at times. A session I didn’t really like, shots I wasn’t really happy with; I’ll walk away for a bit, then come back to them and like them much more. But I digress. A lot of the time I can only see what I am doing wrong. And I get frustrated. I see in my work the same things that I rely on time and time again. I desire so strongly to break out of the norm and do something different. Change how I am shooting. But in the end, I fall back on what is reliable. What is expected. I stay inside my nice little box of “do this, shoot that.”
It’s scary to step outside the box.
When you stay inside the the box things don’t change. You don’t mess up. Your work stays the same.
It’s also pretty boring if you never step outside the box. You never mess up. Your work always stays the same. Complacency sets in.
And when that happens over and over, you kind of get the “blahs.” And the blahs are no good. Especially when you’re looking at four sessions in 48 hours!!
Amy’s session was my breaking out of the box and banishing the “blahs”. I had been pretty “eh” about myself and my work recently. Her session helped me out of my funk and helped me love my camera again. It definitely helped me love maternity all over again!! We set up three gorgeous, fun outfits and two locations. Add to that a beautiful momma-to-be who knows how to stand and who is an absolute natural as well as some yummy light and great backdrops and you have the cure for the blahs. I didn’t do anything totally ground breaking here. But for ME it was something different and outside of MY box. I had total say on locations and a lot of say in the outfits. The poses were about 50/50. But I love love love what we came up with together and I hope you do, too. 🙂
I can honestly say that I don’t think I have looked forward to anyone being pregnant and having a baby more than our friends John and Rachel. (Well, obviously I was more excited about *our* pregnancies and babies.) But in terms of friends they are right up there at the top. You have these best friends in your life. Sometimes they are the people you grew up with (as my husband did with John and Rachel) and sometimes, like I have spoken about before, they are the people you inherit through marriage, like I did with them. And when these people start to go through huge things like engagement, marriage, pregnancy you cannot help but be absolutely thrilled for them!! John and Rachel got married three weeks after us. John was Matt’s best man and Matt was in John’s wedding. They have had a great six years of marriage, traveling, doing all sorts of things those of us that had kids quickly did not get to do. 😉 But now, they are ready to welcome their first child, who is going to be an absolutely beautiful little girl, into their lives. So last week when they came to visit us for the day, I took them out for some maternity pictures to document this amazing time in their lives. Rachel is absolutely stunning, as we knew she would be. And they are just as goofy as ever 🙂 And we are so, SO very excited for them and cannot wait to meet their little girl!
(John I know you hate this sweater but I actually really love this photo ;))
