When I got pregnant in 2016 with our first child, I knew I wanted something different for my maternity photos. I felt powerful growing a Child inside of me, and I wanted to channel that inner Goddess and feel celebrated in my photographs. I knew that once the baby came, I would feel the opposite, with a body I would have to readjust to and a mindset shift about photographs of me in general.

When I ended up having three pregnancies three years in a row, I never could have known how happy I would be that I booked that session and did it differently. When I look back on the photographs now, I feel that flush of power, that confidence, that I felt before the realities of motherhood hit me hard and fast. They hang in the hallway of our home, and I look at them every day now. I sit beneath them when I fold the laundry, my sons point to my belly asking which of them was inside there, and sometimes I need that physical reminder of how beautiful it was that I made them.

(photos of me by Hoffer Photography)

Most people don’t know this, but I have been painting over my photographs (for fun) for 12 years. It was something I did in my “off season” (when I wasn’t shooting weddings) but when I pulled my encaustic back out during the Quarantine in 2020, the artist in me was reawakened.

Encaustic Painting over photograph

2018

Even before I was Pregnant, I saw pregnancy as an exceptionally beautiful time. Motherhood was my first muse, and coming back to photography after having my sons only amplified my desire to help women feel like a living, breathing work of art.

And so that is what I do now.

In 2021, I hosted an afternoon of styled shoots with the intention of not only creating gorgeous digital images, but also choosing one to paint over for a final encaustic painting included at the end.