Every Sunday we drive down a country road to church and pass by the most amazing abandoned barn. It’s three stories tall, made from big grey bricks and topped with a faded red metal roof. I’ve dreamed of taking pictures of, in, around, by and in front of this barn from the moment I saw it, however the giant “NO TRESPASSING” signs put a damper on my enthusiasm. Cody the lawyer was sure to remind me just how many times he had to see ordinary people plead guilty to trespassing and have to fill out “misdemeanor” on every job application from there on out.

I figured a misdemeanor wouldn’t be that bad since I won’t be filling out job applications anytime soon and YOU GUYS THIS BARN WOULD BE SO WORTH THE MISDEMEANOR.

I figured I’d wait for the perfect photo to commit my misdemeanor so when it came time to take Emily’s maternity photos? I was ready to wear long sleeves so the cuffs wouldn’t chaff.

Cody then had the very logical idea to find out who owned the property and ask permission, he’s so the Yin to my Yang.

The barn belongs to a 77 year old man, and while he couldn’t understand why I wanted to traipse through the overgrown woods surrounding his old barn just to take a few pictures, he gave me his blessing and even more importantly, his permission. “If Edgar or anybody else stops to give you trouble, you just tell them Bob said it was okay.”

These pictures, they are everything I could have ever imagined. I can’t thank my very very pregnant Emily enough for wading through waist high thorny bushes and climbing over rusty barbed wire so she could fulfill my vision. I also have to thank my friend Zack Arias for teaching me as much as he could in 16 hours about off camera lighting.

Now I just have to convince Cody to buy me a big old barn of my own.

I’m so going back to that barn. (With permission, of course.)

Below is my most favorite maternity photo of myself. I’m 39 weeks pregnant and I felt lovely and round and wonderful. I told my mom what I had in mind and she made it happen. We took them against my big West facing windows at sunset. There’s something about the shape of a pregnant woman that I am completely enamored with, and silhouetting her is one of the best ways to capture her curves.

Yesterday I took photos of Emily, 38 weeks pregnant, with the same idea in mind. Emily is one of those pregnant ladies that doesn’t look pregnant from behind. In fact, if you put your thumb over her belly and close one eye she doesn’t even look pregnant from the side or the front. I’ve been wanting to do a post called “Love Your Histogram” for a long time, because a histogram is a picture takers best friend.

I put together this little tutorial of sorts to explain how I use the histogram in Lightroom 3 to my advantage to make a really lovely silhouetted portrait without any fancy studio equipment.

• This is the photo SOOC (straight out of the camera) I shot in raw and did my best to overexpose the background as much as possible. As you can see holding the camera straight is not one of my strong suits so the first order of business is to straighten her out.

• Since the background is going to end up being pure white the only thing that matters is if your subject looks like she’s standing up straight.

• Now that she’s all straightened out and centered you’re going to adjust your exposure and black sliders until you can click on the little highlight warning/alert arrows in your Lightroom histogram (You will not be able to click on the arrows until there are blown out portions of your photo, meaning absolute pure white and absolute pure black with no detail in them whatsoever. Almost every photo should have pure white and pure black portions, even if it’s just the tiniest smidge like the blacks in this photo. One of my biggest complaints with black and white photos is that they are muddy, meaning there is no pure white or no pure black in the photo, it just ends up looking flat.)

• Once you have your histogram highlight arrows selected your photo should look like the one below. The red portions are the pure white areas of your photo and the blue are the true black areas. The black in this photo doesn’t matter as much as the white but it has to be there to bring out the best contrast and detail in her lovely face and shape.

• Next you’re going to “paint” by over exposing the remaining parts of the background that are not pure white. Perhaps this is the cheaters way of accomplishing this, but I don’t want to haul my full studio set up everywhere I go and this gets the job done quite well. In Lightroom (version 2 or later) you’re going to select the paintbrush to exposure and move your slider up as far as it will go, then you just paint over the almost white areas.

• When you’re done, your photo will look like this, the background pure white as demonstrated by the histogram alerts.

• Deselect your histogram highlight alerts to get a feel for what your photo looks like now.

• The last thing I did was warm the photo up ever so slightly. It may have been bright and sunny outside but it was cloudy which meant very washed out skin tones that no white balance could have loved.

• That’s it! (I mean, I say that’s it because that’s all I had to do and I’ve done this before so maybe it won’t be quite so easy your first try but maybe it will be in which case YAY!) Regardless, you at least have a starting point and this could just as easily be done in Photoshop (well, “easy” is a relative term when it comes to Photoshop with beginners. Lightroom is my lover, the end.) Isn’t she LOVELY?

You can make your own bokeh kit, or you can buy one like I did.