Pregnant men for “The League of Families”

I recently had the pleasure of being contacted by Damien Kremer, of The League of Families, who was looking for a professional portrait photographer also experienced in retouching and photomontage.

photographe retoucheur professionnel

On Father’s Day, The League of Families highlighted its fight to make paternity leave mandatory, and to reduce the pressure some fathers receive from their employer, when they wish to take their paternity leave. And to produce an original image for this concept, Damien Kremer gave me a photographic and photomontage project consisting of the creation of 3 pregnant men!


Video Report by RTBF

During the photo shoot we were also filmed by a team from RTBF who produced a video report on the paternity leave issue.


The photos portraits :

To achieve the final results, I did two photo shoots. The first shoot concentrated on the fathers-to-be, with them posing as pregnant women.

Laurent, Giles and Aurélien, three young fathers who are aware of the problem and want to take action and/or are invested in the League of Families, joined in. So they posed with a cushion on their stomach in order to simulate the shape, but also to better mimic what a pregnant woman’s posture would be during a portrait photo shoot.
photographe retoucheur professionnel Bruxelles

The second stage was to produce portraits of some mothers-to-be. Their photographs, above all those of their stomachs, would act as the model for the photomontage. Once more, many thanks to Lisa and Sarah for their beautiful performance!

photographe retoucheur Bruxelles

Retouching the photos :

The retouching work here was fundamental, because the photomontage had to make the final image appear very realistic. All the work was in finding the perfect balance between the men’s portraits and the women’s in order to ‘fuse’ the bodies in a natural manner. I also had to play with certain details such as the elastic around the waist, beauty spots, veins …

Please see below the making of the retouched photo: