I’d had this idea for a Lake Michigan beach maternity session sitting in my head for months before I did anything about it.
Not my usual style, either. As a Grand Rapids maternity photographer, most of my sessions lean soft and flowy — gowns, golden fields, that kind of romantic feel, or lately in studio with creative lighting techniques and lots of glamour. But I kept getting pulled toward something more editorial, a golden hour beach session at one of my favorite locations in Saugatuck. Less fabric, more skin and light. Bathing suits instead of tulle. Imagery I’d been admiring from photographers like Anja McDonald, whose beach maternity work leans beautiful and a little bit fearless. I’d signed up to take a class with her at the end of this month, and I wanted to try the style myself first, see what I could figure out on my own before learning from someone who does it better than almost anyone.
So I put out a model call. Light on requirements, loose on details, mostly just a vibe and a hope that the right person would see it.
The message I almost missed
Here’s the part that still gets me: her response was sitting in my inbox within hours. I just didn’t see it. It had landed in a request folder I almost never check — the spam folder of instagram, the inbox corner that catches things and lets them sit. If I hadn’t happened to look that week, I don’t know that this session ever would have existed.
There was a second reason it almost didn’t happen. She was 34 weeks along. My usual sweet spot for maternity sessions is 28 to 32 weeks — enough of a bump to feel dramatic, not so close to the due date that scheduling gets risky, AND the location where this session was to take place would require quite a hike to get to. On paper, she was outside the window I’d normally consider ideal.
None of that mattered the moment I saw her reply. She fit the vision so completely it was almost unsettling — like I’d described someone I hadn’t met yet and she’d shown up anyway.
The nerves that almost talked me out of it
I wish I could say I felt confident heading into this one. I didn’t.
The closer we got to the session, the more I second-guessed whether I could actually pull off the look I’d been imagining for months, or if I was going to fall short.. Nervous enough that, before the shoot even happened, I reached out to Anja directly — the photographer whose work had inspired this whole idea — just to ask for a little guidance. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t about to disappoint a woman who’d trusted me with a vision I’d only ever executed in my head.
Then the weather got involved.
Our original date projected to be rained out entirely. We rescheduled for the night before instead, and even the forecast for that backup night wasn’t much better on paper. Hot. Muggy. A real chance of summer haze rolling in and burying the sun completely. Everything about the plan said this was going to be a session of compromises.
The night that broke every rule
It wasn’t.
The lake we shot at is usually murky, more brown than blue — a very Midwestern, very unglamorous body of water most of the year. That night, it turned an impossible blue-green, the kind of color you’d expect somewhere tropical, not in the middle of the United States. The light wrapped around her instead of fighting her, soft in a way I couldn’t have engineered if I’d tried.
The wind, on the other hand, was almost aggressive. Under any other circumstances it would have wrecked the shoot — hair everywhere, fabric fighting the frame. Instead, it caught her dress at exactly the right angle, again and again, turning what should have been a problem into some of the most dramatic images of the whole night.
I didn’t plan a single one of those elements. Not the message I almost missed, not her being outside my usual timeline, not the weather swap, not the wind. And somehow, it added up to one of my favorite sessions I’ve shot all year.
What I keep coming back to
I keep thinking about this session lately every time I catch myself trying to control every detail of a shoot — the light, the timing, the outfit, the location. This one is proof that some of the best work happens in the parts you didn’t plan for. My job isn’t to force the vision exactly as I imagined it. It’s to stay ready enough to recognize the beauty in the unexpected, when it shows up looking different than I expected.
If you’ve been considering a beach or editorial-style maternity session, you don’t have to live near the water for it to happen — I’m based near Grand Rapids and regularly travel with clients throughout West Michigan, including Holland, Grandville, Rockford, Kentwood, and out to the Lake Michigan shoreline in Saugatuck. Whether you’re right in that “ideal” 28-32 week window or not, I’d love to talk about what a session like this could look like for you. Sometimes the timing that feels a little off is exactly the timing that works.
See more Grand Rapids and West Michigan maternity sessions in my portfolio →
Ready to plan your own Grand Rapids maternity session? Let’s talk about what it could look like — beach, backyard, or somewhere in between.
