Daddy Troy: Welcome back to Gear Daddy. I'm your host, Daddy Troy. Today I'm here with professional photographer Eric Doggett and he's going to tell us all about taking photos of your pregnant wife or partner.
Today's episode is sponsored by BabyBjorn - best baby gear on the planet - Baby Bjorn.
So I'm here today with Eric Doggett of DoggettStudios.com - D-O-G-G-E-T-T Studios.com. He's got a great website. I want dads to know that they can try some of these things at home that we're going to talk about today but kind of the thrust we're talking about today is to hire a professional photographer like Eric to come in. It's a really important time in your life, dad, why not spend a little bit of money - or a lot of money - and have a guy come in like Eric and have some really cool photos. Tell us what you brought into the studio?
Eric Doggett: I brought several here. The first one is by a friend of mine, Heather Mabry. It's a great image that you can start with if you're just trying to get an idea of shots you can take around the house. It's kind of like the hands over the belly shot. Great place to start. You can do this whether it's the bare belly or she has an outfit on. Either way it works.
Next up is by a friend of my named Dave Mclaclan and this shows silhouettes. It's good to try is you have an opportunity where you have this really kind of strong backlit situation maybe by a window or something like that.
Next up is Shannon Cunningham here in Austin and she is really good at taking shots of pregnant women outside. Here she has just has the lady laying down in a field which is just a great shot.
Daddy Troy: We've got a bit of soft focus in the foreground and the sharp in the middle.
Eric: She's done some processing on this image to bring the viewer's eyes close to the belly to make that stand out.
Here are some shots by Teri Mason here in Austin. This shows something that's really popular with pregnant women is to take something like a sheet or fabric and drape them around in that. You can have someone standing off to the side holding it or if it's really windy and you are getting some sort of windblown effect.
Daddy Troy: We've got some other playful ones as well. Let's look at some of those.
Eric: This is a Julia and she kinds of worked some fun creative ways to show off the pregnancy and here she's got the guy being almost looking like a little bit more pregnant than a woman.
Daddy Troy: He is ready to pop.
Eric: I think it's a pretty big basketball. I think he is got under there. And then one of these that I like of hers is this kind of fun shot or if you look in there with the baby block that says, I did that. These are shots I took of my wife Lisa with our second son Traver and what we did here, we just -- they called lifestyle photography, where you take these shots inside the house and even though the camera's focused on the dog and you still see her in the background, so this is just kind of play between multiple subjects in a scene, one has got the focus on them. Maybe the other one doesn't.
Daddy Troy: This next photo, I really like, it's mom, the baby and expecting.
Eric: That's right, so that's my wife Lisa and our first son Brandon. And I did this shot in the bedroom and we basically just took the bedspread and kind of turned upside down to get that red shimmery look. Funny thing with this shot was that I was standing overhead and Brandon was not happy about it. So if you zoomed in really close on the eyes, you can see some little tears starting there to come because he was over it at this point.
Daddy Troy: And I really like this next, experimented really funny, tell me about those?
Eric: I love out of the box photography and these next two examples are some of my favorites. Just as I said, I loved it where she took pregnant woman and took the name tag - hello my name is and wrote baby's name on there and slapped it on the belly.
If you look at the background it doesn't look like it's a studio shot because it's just as easily be against the wall somewhere.
The next one is another shot of my wife Lisa and there was a construction going on across the street and so I was trying to think of something fun to do and we just ran over there. What I love about it is it's taking something like a subject and putting it somewhere where you don't expect that.
Daddy Troy: Hey, Eric thanks so much for coming in.
Eric: Sure.
Daddy Troy: I am going to have links to have these photographers on my blog at dadlabs.com, go check it out. And Eric is going to be back next week and he's going to talk about really innovative birth announcements on a website called boxofficebaby.com.
Eric: Boxofficebaby.com
Daddy Troy: And you all dad should check this out because you could also use it for a really creative party invite and finally when we have Eric back again another time and we're going to talk about camera choices for the new and veteran dad with the kind of slant on how to take pictures of the newborn baby. We'll see you next time on Gear Daddy and all week long at dadLabs.com
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