My wife, Shefi, was in the last stages of pregnancy with our twins and was due any day. We were of course super excited! Knowing that this was the last chance to take some pregnancy shots, I was planning to go out to the nature but the great outdoors is not so easy to find in Delhi. Anywhere you go there are people around so I reverted to the confines of our small living room. The image came out very warm and peaceful and her expression was so welcoming. I could feel the anticipation for the babies to come out already and shared the excitement of course.
Being a documentary photographer, I usually don’t play with PhotoShop effects in my work, but here I decided to give it a go and use some techniques that I wanted to experiment with. For this picture I used natural light coming from the door on the left side of the frame. Slow shutter speed. To get the color effect I first converted the image to Grayscale and then applied ‘Antique light’ filter in Adobe Lightroom. Further enhancement in PhotoShop to give some more depth and contrast. I then superimposed a second shot of a sheet of brown paper to achieve the texture on the wall and her body. The image looks somewhere between a picture and a painting with the textured wall looking like the painter’s canvas.
Published in Marie Clair (India) in the June 2010 issue, opening stroy by Priyamvada Kowshik.
