Anxiously Awaiting Addison | Jennifer+Shelby | The Maternity Chronicle

Shelby contacted me a few months back about shooting their maternity pictures, and their soon to be newborn’s 1st year!  I couldn’t say no!  I love photography.  I love capturing people’s memories as only I can. And of course… I.LOVE.BABIES!!! I cannot wait to meet little Miss Addison here in a couple of short weeks and capture her and her loving parents! They love “feet shots” and so do I!  They love “fun” and “random” shots…so do I…so we were a match made in Heaven!!  Plus they were gung ho for my off the wall ideas…BONUS!   Jennifer is one heck of a champ too!  She kept up and I know she had to be sore and tired but for the sake of the shots she gilded gracefully through…pregnant women are my heroines!

A little about my FAVORITE shot…possibly of all time!  I knew I wanted to do something very different than anything I’d ever seen before in not only a maternity shoot but any shoot…and trust me…as a self taught photographer I’ve studied A LOT of other photographer’s work and coming up with an “original” idea is something that seems impossible, but it can be achieved!  I just didn’t know what!  Silhouettes are dear to my heart so that shot was a must, but what about something new? I thought and thought…and then one day as I was getting my clothes out of the washer I noticed my mother had found and washed this piece of pale pink chiffon I used in my early teen years as a canopy over my bed.  It hit me!  “Silhouette” the bump with the fabric…and pray for wind!  I’ve never prayed for wind at a shoot….on a hot day sure….but typically it’s not conducive to portraits.

We set off to the Stones River Battlefield in Murfreesboro, TN where I just knew this tall yellow/gold grass would be perfect for the shot I had concocted in my head…annnnnnd they had burned it…almost ALL of it! 😦 Sadness!  So we drove around the park and found one gorgeous spot with lovely new green growth and once we fired off shots there battling worms on feet, thorns, and blazing our own paths we headed back to the cars….and there it was…the PERFECT spot!  Not what I’d envisioned completely but it would have to do…it was the only grass left!  I sat on a stob of the sharp remnants of the recently cut and burned grass while my friend/”Assistant” Tina and the devoted husband/daddy to be Shelby traipsed the field fighting the wind to get that lovely fabric to “fly”!  I think they tossed it 50 times (may be a *slight* exaggeration 😉  I prayed.  The wind picked up, Shelby and Tina twisted the ends slightly and threw them in to the wind…I watched through the lens as Jennifer walked across the field and the magic happened!  If I hadn’t caught it with my camera I wouldn’t believe it happened….but it did!  Not Photoshopped, just perfectly answered prayer….and what I came for….a magical maternity portrait unlike any other!  I raised my own bar that day…and here’s to keeping it going!  When I stop striving for new,  different and better is when I shall hang up my camera; for nothing beautiful and truly great comes from being stagnant and content, but from a constant desire to push the envelope and “change the game”! And you can quote me on that!

Someone once said to me “I don’t understand the purpose of maternity pictures.  What’s the point?”  This hurt my heart a little but I realized some can’t see the beauty in the miracle of not only conception (as so much of the media seems to portray it as so “Easy” these days, but it’s a real and constant struggle for so many wonderful husbands and wives who just can’t conceive and want to so badly), but the miracle of how a woman’s body changes, shifts, stretches to accommodate a new life and then brings it forth in to the world, is something that should boggle the mind…it’s an amazing design.

In a shifting society where children are treated as means for welfare, slaves, divorce pawns or fashion accessories for the young or famous we could easily lose sight of just how magical and miraculous this whole beautiful process is.  THAT’S why Maternity portraits are important!  That’s why I love them!  You get that absolute gorgeous glow of the expectant mother and, when he can be present, that eager anticipation from the soon to be daddy…plus you get flirtation and playfulness from the giddy parents as they await that life altering being that will forever unite them in the creation of a life…a life breathed by God Himself and entrusted to them for his/her time on this earth!  There are so many parts to these special shoots that I could rattle off, but I must say seeing the profile and the purely amazing stretch of the belly that we lovingly call “the bump” makes my heart smile!  It reminds me that enormous things come out of the most seemingly ordinary vessels and that God’s power and plan is limitless!

So I think I’ve told you enough “backstory”…now on to the goodies!  I give you: Anxiously Awaiting Addison!