Maternity CC request

[twocolor]

I am so tired of all the little facebook groups where one person says "it's perfect" and the next person says "it's trash" and then they all argue about it for the rest of the thread.

This is out of my norm, indoor maternity shoot on seamless. It snowed and snowed and we got as many outdoor shots as we could in the conditions and relented to come indoors.

Please, honest CC. There are things I know I should fix. Her face is too smooth. She had terrible acne and then used a lot of thick makeup to try and get mask it which of course just made bumpy skin. I used frequency separation but maybe a tad too much. So I'll go back in and give her some more realistic skin. Anything else?

 

[twocolor]

Sorry Big Mike, didn't mean to post twice. It didn't look like it created the thread it just sat and thought and thought and thought and then stopped thinking so I hit the create thread button again. Please feel free to delete!

 

[MidnightUK]

I really like the overall tone and coloring/styling of this image. I like her expression (but yes, she does look plastic) and I like your choice of framing.

Personally I would have preferred to see a little less leg at the top, or maybe tone down the brightness of that area a little as I feel the eye is drawn towards her crotch area rather than to the bump.

Overall though I think you did very well and I imagine she (and her child in time) will both be pleased with it. She looks quite glamorous.

 

[tirediron]

Not sure how I missed this one; perhaps a hairlight camera left?

 

[paigew]

Wrap her other arm around her belly. She looks disconnected (from her pregnancy). Also maybe Have her glance down at her belly.


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[dasmith232]

Overall, I think that it's nice. For me, there are two nitpicky things that I'll mention.

First is the leading lines and high contrast of her dress against her body.

My eye is drawn to contrast. The dark maroon tones of her dress against the light pale tones of her body are very high contrast. Plus with it being a very distinct line (and our eyes like to follow leading lines) and having two lines converge on her torso puts a lot of visual weight on her belly. Plus, the patch of her upper thigh being visible has the same thing: high contrast visual weight.

I don't think that it's wrong to have that visual weight down low. This is (after all) a maternity shot. I just think it's a lot of visual weight down low that's competing away from her face (and the essence of her character). I think(?) a maternity picture should be about mother and baby, but in this case I wonder if the picture is moving a little bit towards the biological event and away from her as a person.

This is a really subtle thing and could be completely wrong. It's just how I was reading the picture.

Second is the stray hand.

I also like the idea of doing something else with her right hand (and there's probably more than one option). With her right arm bent, it creates some good aesthetic energy. But there's a lot of distance between the two arms (or more specifically, the hands). As a result, I think that the left hand feels disconnected.

I'm not sure when or where I picked up on this, but I try to avoid disconnected hands in portraiture. It could be just me, but I think of them as the disconnected hand (named "Thing") from "The Addams Family". (For those that don't know, "The Addams Family" was a macabre sitcom on television from the 1960's. It was literally a hand not attached to an arm or anything else that ran around the house.)

This happens a lot with couples where one person has a hand on the other person's shoulder.

With the two hands closer together, it might make the stray hand feel less disconnected. But that gets into posing and I like what you've done with the rest of the posing. I don't have a recommendation on what else to do, and I personally don't do maternity, so not qualified to give any meaningful recommendations.

 

[Studio7Four]

Coming late to the party on this one, but...

There's a lot I like about this image. The tones in it work very well together - her skin, the dress, and the seamless are very complimentary. I like the lighting. I agree with tirediron that a hair light could work, and would very much be called for in a typical portrait, but I personally like letting elements away from the belly fade a bit into the background. I also like the rapport she has with the camera - the tilt to her head, her expression, and her eye contact work very well. She comes across as a confident, beautiful woman who happens to be pregnant. Not all maternity images have to be about the bond between mother-to-be and her child-to-be.

There are a few things I'd tweak (that haven't been covered above). IMO the composition is just a bit off. The horizontal center line of the image seems to be right about where her dress separates at the top of her belly. This creates in imbalance in which most of her body is just left of center while her belly is just right of center. I think if the center of the image were where her dress makes a little V in the center of her chest you would end up with a more balanced image (her head just slightly left of center, her belly and leg slightly right of center). Alternatively you could move her more off center (crop from the left), though in this particular case I don't know that the unbalanced negative space to the right would buy you much. I actually think this would work very well as a square crop...

This may be unfair to say, not having seen how the dress drapes in person, but how it hangs over her belly leaves a bit to be desired (to me). From this angle, the near side of the dress looks like it's hanging pretty much straight down, we don't get a feel for it following the curve of her belly. And I wish the far side of the dress wasn't visible all the way down to her hand, that it had wrapped off the far side of her belly instead. As it is we get an artificial curve to her belly - the highest contrast is between her skin and the dress - which makes it almost look like we're seeing her belly in profile rather than the 3/4 angle of her pose. Had the dress fallen off the far side we'd have ended up with belly against the seamless and gotten a better feel for her form.

Lastly, I don't mind seeing her thigh, I actually think the shot would benefit from seeing a bit more of it (see my above interpretation of the shot). This bit of thigh does seem like a bit of an afterthought and does pull from the belly a bit. I think if the dress draped a bit differently, not hanging straight down in front of her leg, it would have seemed more organic. Or, even better, I think pulling back a bit would help. You'd get a bit more of the length of the leg and, as a consequence, move her belly slightly higher in the frame. This would help with the visually low weighting that dasmith232 mentioned.

Overall I really like this, thanks for sharing!