Expectations

To my eyes there are very few things on the planet that are as beautiful as a mother looking forward to the birth of her child. I love beautiful “baby bump” photography.

The “set” for this image was created in my studio. We worked together on quite a few different poses and varying amounts and placements of the gauzy fabric, ending up with several favorites.

The only light source for this photo is diffused window light coming from camera left with a translucent blind over the window. This gave me soft, semi-directional light with shadows that aren’t too harsh or sharp edged. There is a reason the “old masters” loved window light for paintings of people. The light intensity was low.

Metering was pretty straight forward. I metered the mother’s skin on the side facing the window. Metering the side away from the window would result in over exposed “blown out” skin on the window side. This is a nice effect sometimes but not what I wanted for this image.

I began with an aperture of f/8 to give me an adequate amount of depth of field.  This gave me a recommended meter reading of f/8, 0.4 seconds, at ISO 100.  That was a longer shutter speed than I wanted (especially after I did some exposure compensation) so I changed the ISO to 400 which gave me an equivalent exposure of f/8, and 1/10 second.

I wanted the mother’s skin to be one stop lighter than a medium tone so I added one stop of light to the camera’s suggested meter reading by changing the shutter speed from 1/10 to 1/5 second (“plus 1 exposure compensation”).  Most people’s skin is lighter or darker than a medium tone (the same tonality as an 18% gray card) so some exposure compensation is usually in order to get the best quality portraits.

With a shutter speed this slow the camera was on a tripod for optimum image quality.

Photo Data: Canon 5D camera, Canon EF 24-105mm lens at 35mm. 1/5 sec,  f/8, ISO 400.

Links

You can learn more about metering in this series of exposure articles.

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