Postpartum Photography Project
As I often mention in my newsletter and social media, outside of photography and parenting, I facilitate postpartum groups. I have been running these groups since 2022 and love that they are an overlap of my previous work as an art therapist (though is not clinical) and my desire to stay within the perinatal sphere. I’m endlessly amazed by the moms who come through my groups!
I was recently inspired to start a photography project with these new moms. I have been playing around with the idea of taking a portrait of moms with their babies, but OF the moms. So often, photos of the newborn days highlight the babies. It is often the case that, when I ask moms to share a picture of themselves and their baby with the group, they realize they have few - if any - pictures that include them.
When I started playing around with free-lensing on my camera, the project came together. I love how it incorporates this hazy fog and how that plays with the experience of early postpartum. I love how you can see baby, but they’re intentionally removed from being the subject of the portrait, putting the focus, literally and figuratively, on mom.
This is a personal project and I don’t know yet how it will grow and change, but I’m always eager to make more of these.
Reach out if you’re interested in being part of it. If we already have a newborn session planned, I would love to include one of these portraits in it for you.
If you’re interested in the technical piece of this, here’s a little more about freelensing:
Free-lensing is a technique of detaching the camera lens from the camera body and using your hand to manipulate the relationship between lens and camera to impact the focus. This often creates an effect of a line of focus through the image, rather than a plane of focus (if you’re interested in learning more info about the nitty gritty of why this is, there’s lots of info out there that explains it with visuals). This allows me to focus on the mom’s eyes and keep everything else out of focus, even though she and the baby are within the same plane.