My best friends Kelvin and Carey are having a baby any minute now. Carey knows that I don’t normally shoot maternity type shots so we decided it would be best to leave that up to a REAL professional. However at the very last minute I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do a creative portrait of Carey while she has little Evie in the womb. So I packed up the lights and headed for their house. I purchased an outfit for Carey that would be very inappropriate for a pregnant woman to wear, and we settled on hair rollers with big makeup. Everything came together once we had the idea of shooting in their backyard near the chicken coop. The shot above really describes my friend Carey to the “T”, wacky, fun, loving, and smart. As I was testing my lights around 6:00pm or so I saw sunbeams in my viewfinder. I knew just then that I had only a few minutes to capture the sunbeams in a shot. I positioned Carey against the sun for rim lighting her and getting the sunbeams in the frame. I positioned one monolight camera right with a deep reflector for the key light. I then positioned another monolight with a 1’x3’ softbox behind and to Carey’s right for fill. The last part was to figure out how to light the chickens on the ground. My attempt to light the chickens was to use their water feeder as a light source by sticking a bare Speedlight in the feeder, it kinda worked. Total shoot time 15 minutes.