I did a Maternity Session with this sweet couple only five days before their baby girl decided to join them on the outside of the belly. To say that I’m grateful that we were able to capture these photos before baby was born is an understatement. Unfortunately you don’t get a second chance on maternity photos once the pregnancy is over, so we got them done just in time!
These photos are so full of love, and we were also lucky to get a stunning sunset this evening. The lighting in these pictures highlights the absolute magic of pregnancy and makes them even more special. I often get the question if it’s necessary to do your maternity session during sunset? Well, let’s talk about it!
What is the difference between doing your photos during sunset and in the middle of the day?
The quality of light changes throughout the day. We are all able to see the difference between soft sunrise light coming through the window as you wake up, and the type of light that smacks you right in the face at 1pm when you’re eating your lunch. As the sun travels over the sky during the day, the light shifts. The closer that the sun gets to the horizon – the softer the light become. That means that we get the softest light possible in the first hour after the sun comes out, and the last hour before the sunset.
So if we take pictures during the hour leading up to sunset we are going to get that sweet soft light that makes everything glow and smoothens your skin. If we were to instead head out to the beach at 1pm and have our photos done at that time, we would get a very harsh light that creates harsh shadows in our faces and makes most of us squint (or even shut our eyes completely, if you’re anything like me). I mean we all wear sunglasses for a reason, right?
Is it really that big of a deal if I do my session a couple hours earlier in the day?
If you want the glowy photos where the sun is shining from the back and creating a glow around the people in the photo – then you need to do your photo session before sunset or right around sunrise. But I find that most people prefer a sunset session over getting up at 5am for a photoshoot..
Without getting too technical, a camera can not handle light the same way as our eyes do. So if it’s too bright, the contrast between the bright and dark parts of a photo can to be too big for the camera to handle. One way this can affect your photos is that the background is too bright and disappears behind you. In the photos you see in this post you can clearly see the ocean and the hills in the background. But if these same photos were taken in the middle of the day, much of that would disappear.
In the middle of the day the sun is at the highest in the sky, right above us. If you’re looking at the photo above, you can see that the sun is lower in the sky and is peaking through the tree in the back. If this photo was taken during the middle of the day, the sun would be coming in from above. So this specific quality of light where the sun is hitting from a lower angle is only happening close to sunrise/sunset.
The difference between doing the session one hour before sunset and three hours before sunset is HUGE. This is why I always recommend doing your session 1,5 hours before sunset – to get this gorgeous glowy light that we see in these photos.
