Personal Work - In The Beginning

© all copyright belongs to Gareth Iwan-Jones, do not use without prior authorisation.

This is Alex.  She is a talented make up artist and whilst working together we'd discussed the idea of photographing her and her baby bump. There are loads of wonderfully bonkers images of pregnant women out there (see here). As inspiring as those images are, I fancied something a little different (in a less firearms sort of way) and Alex being hard as nails was happy to get involved.

The original idea was to have Alex soaked and emerging from a lake. No heavily pregnant person wants to stand in a lake in February so I decided to comp different images together. We photographed Alex on a studio background and shot the landscape environments separately. The lake image didn't end up being my favourite. Instead the seascape above, which was shot along the beautiful Jurassic coastline in Dorset, worked the best.

© all copyright belongs to Gareth Iwan-Jones, do not use without prior authorisation.

The portrait above was taken whilst photographing the cutouts to be dropped onto the background image. During the shoot I could see it was working particularly well, so I took a few shots towards the end designed to be standalone portraits. I love the punchy look of the image, a bit different from the softness one would usually associate with pregnancy images.