Before your baby is even born you want to take pictures of that beautiful bump. Doing maternity photos yourself isn’t that hard but you have to take the time to put some effort into editing them. You can use a tripod but you don’t have to, you can just set the camera on a table or dresser. Your camera will have to have a timer function though.
When I did this for myself I had to stay indoors. There was no way that I was going to attempt this at a park and look like a complete crazy taking maternity photos of myself. So for a backdrop I hung a black sheet. Another trick for interesting Maternity photos is taking silhouettes by having the light source behind you.
Take lots of photos, even if they turn out awful, some editing might make them savable!
Don’t spend tons of money on a fancy-shmancy editing software, I just use picnik.com or photoshop.com. You have to register and you with picnik you have the option for subscribing for more tools but the basic free stuff is all you really need.
When dealing with stretch marks turning a photo black and white helps, but if thats still not enough there are touch-up tools on the editing sites that you can try.
The most important thing about DIY maternity photos is in the editing otherwise you probably wont end up with anything worthwhile. So spend lots of time familiarizing yourself with whatever editing software or website you choose. Play around get creative.
Keep the original photo in case you come up with an idea later on. Also the more you edit it the poorer and poorer the quality will become so keep that in mind. It might still look ok on the computer but when you try to get and enlargement printed you will have a problem.