We’ve photographed a lot of weddings in our career, but recently we photographed one with a big variable. Amy was 35 weeks pregnant! Just a little over a month from the due date! We thought it might be helpful to hear the things we did to prepare for it to help anyone else who might be wondering how to shoot a wedding day pregnant! We made a checklist down below for you!
Other photographers, you probably feel us on this one, but for years, we’ve both have recurring bad dreams about…wedding days! Amy’s most common nightmare is the sun goes DOWN for good during the first look Rational, right? The other is she has is having to walk through *ocean waves* (and risk getting the camera wet!) to get to the portrait location (don’t ask us why this is the bad dream scenario…we literally live in a desert!) It makes no sense.
But when Jordan had a nightmare that Amy WENT INTO LABOR during our most recent wedding, we started making a serious game plan to cope 😂 Not because Amy thought she was going to go into labor (only Jordan was terrified of that haha!) but because we know how ten hours on our feet, lifting heavy gear, squatting into weird positions and all the energy it takes to direct, pose and shoot a wedding day feels on a regular day!
We asked our friends on Instagram for ideas, and there were so many good ones we used! We thought it might be helpful to have a post of all the ideas compiled that you can bookmark in case you ever find yourself in the position of wondering how to shoot a wedding day pregnant!
Here’s everything Amy did to make the experience as smooth as possible:
✔️ Wore the most comfy pair of flat booties (Something like these!)
✔️ Brought a different pair of shoes for the reception (makes such a difference to give your feet a change!) Amy brought one of her go-to shooting pairs of shoes: Rothy’s (“The Point” flats in leopard print)
✔️ Compression socks all day (these were hard to get on in the morning but really helped!)
✔️ Hydrating the night before with LMNT packets in my water – also brought them to the wedding! You can get these packets on Amazon!
✔️ Packed Perfect Bars in Amy’s small camera bag that she takes with her so she could easily take a bite walking from one location to the next (The peanut butter ones are our FAVE 😍)
✔️ We brought an amazing third shooter (an AJ Workshop alum!) who *could* have taken over *JUST* in case Jordan’s nightmare came true! We love you Karlee K Photography! Thanks for all your help and these behind the scenes photos!!
✔️ Hot bath with Dr. Teal’s epsom salt and foaming bubble bath AS SOON as we got home to relax all the sore muscles and relieve gravity (felt like victory!!)
✔️ Best decision: Scheduling an at-home prenatal massage the next morning (did you know there’s a business that’s like Uber for massages?! We had no idea! It was our first time using Zeel and it was HEAVEN!! If you want to try it, you can use the promo code 16BC5 to get $20 off your first massage!)
The best part? We feel SO proud of the images! Because we took all the steps listed above, Amy felt SO much better than she expected and had a great amount of energy and stamina all day to give our clients our very best!
