I had a feeling Bella’s underwater maternity session was going to be something special before we ever got in the water. Knowing that Bella is a dancer, and that dancers just have this way of moving through the world that the rest of us spend years trying to fake.

She knows exactly where her hands and feet are at any given second, she’s completely unselfconscious about taking up space, and she trusts her body in a way that most of us have to be talked into, all of which happens to be the whole game when it comes to underwater maternity photography. It’s hard to say anyone is ‘a natural’ when it comes to being photographed, but Bella certainly made it feel that way. 

The one thing I couldn’t do anything about was the sky. We had a fully overcast day, flat and grey. The kind of forecast that usually has me refreshing my weather app and bargaining with the clouds. I wasn’t worried for long, though, and you’ll understand why the moment you scroll through, because some of the most beautiful images I’ve ever made underwater came out of that moody grey afternoon with Bella.

A Dancer in the Water: Why Bella’s Session Worked

Water takes away all the parts of a maternity shoot that usually make people miserable, because the second you’re floating you’re weightless and fully supported. You’re no longer fighting gravity or holding some pose until your lower back and feet start staging a full protest. For Bella that freedom meant she could move the way she’s trained her whole life to move, and you can genuinely see it in every frame, from the way she extends through her arms to the way she curls herself around her belly like she’d been rehearsing it for weeks, (which she hadn’t), because the water just lets your body find what feels good on its own.

I’ll be real about why I started offering this session in the first place, because it runs deeper than just getting gorgeous photos of dancers. Maternity sessions can be genuinely hard on pregnant people. Your body is in the middle of the most exhausting work it may ever ever do, and the idea of getting dressed up to take a long walk and frolic through a field at the very end of your pregnancy sounds, to an awful lot of my clients, more like a punishment than a celebration. So many of my past brides and maternity clients have told me they felt completely torn, because they desperately wanted to document this season of their lives, but they just didn’t feel like themselves, and they weren’t sure they wanted a camera anywhere near them.

Underwater maternity photography is the thing I wish I could have handed all of them years ago. You don’t do your makeup, you don’t fuss with your hair, you simply show up and slip into a heated pool and float. In all this time I have yet to have a single client climb out of that water without telling me how good they felt the entire time.

Making Magic on an Overcast Day

So, about that grey sky. 

Overcast light can feel like a curse but it’s some of my very favorite light to shoot in, because it’s soft and filters down through the water turning it into this gentle, dreamy wash that flatters absolutely everything it lands on. There was no bright sun for Bella to squint into and no hard shadows across her face. The surface of the water stayed soft and silvery instead of blowing out into harsh white patches, so her skin came out luminous and the whole set has this calm, otherworldly feeling that I’m not sure I could have planned for on a sunny day.

None of it asked a thing of Bella, either, which is really the entire point of shooting this way. The pool is heated, so she was warm and comfortable from the first minute to the last, and she arrived with a bare face and undone hair because underwater that is genuinely all you need. From there I just talked her through everything while she did what dancers do best.

And in case you’re wondering whether I simply decided one day to start putting pregnant people in pools, I promise I didn’t. I trained for this with Becky, an incredible underwater photographer based in Australia who taught me everything I know about working safely and beautifully beneath the surface. Learning it properly matters enormously when you’re photographing expecting mamas in water. It’s a big part of why a session like Bella’s stays so calm and easy even when the weather flat-out refuses to cooperate.

Ready to Book Your Own Underwater Maternity Session?

“Elsie made me feel so beautiful at that notorious time in pregnancy when I didn’t feel quite like myself and greatly needed a hype woman at my side. She helped me see my growing body in such a beautiful way, and the photos she took will forever be some of my favorite pictures of myself.”

If Bella’s session has you picturing your own, I would genuinely love to hear from you, because you really don’t have to be a dancer and you definitely don’t need the sun to show up for you. There’s nothing to prepare beyond getting excited about it, since all you actually do is climb into the water and let it hold you. Almost every client I photograph this way tells me they’d happily get right back in the pool, and I’d happily have them.

If you want to see what underwater maternity photography could look like for you, come say hi and let’s start planning your session.