For some time, I had wanted to do a video that used time lapsed or sequenced still images of a woman’s developing pregnancy.

I thought this would be particularly useful in illustrating the normal physiologic changes of pregnancy, particularly in the breasts, the abdomen, and maternal posture.

These changes have been described in the past, but not visualized in this way, at least not to my knowledge.

I had a patient who was newly pregnant with her second baby. I had delivered her first baby, and we had a pretty good rapport.

I explained my interest in taking photographs of her pregnancy, over time, that I would use for teaching. Her face would never be included, and her identity never revealed.

She willingly agreed. She had done some modeling in the past, and her husband was a photographer.

The video showing these pictures accomplishes what I was trying to do, but I made some mistakes along the way. If I were doing it today, I’d change a few things.

First, I tried too hard to make this appropriate for both professional and lay viewing. I think I should have picked one audience or the other.

I added a guitar soundtrack in the background, mainly to add an artistic feel to the video, but I don’t think I needed the background music. I could have filled the 5 minutes with more narration.

I didn’t appreciate until later the importance of having the patient stand in exactly the same place, with the camera located at precisely the same place, and at the same height for each shoot.

My excuse is that there was a learning curve to this, and I didn’t grasp all the complexities early on.

If I were to do it today, I’d mark on the floor the exact position for each of her feet, and each place for the camera tripod. I’d measure the exact height of the tripod and duplicate that height at each shoot.

I also didn’t appreciate how important consistent lighting was. I experimented during the shoot with both direct and indirect lighting. I should have stayed with indirect, and probably less, rather than more.

To make up for the lighting variations, I needed to do some photoshopping of the color balance and saturation of each image to get a consistent look.

Some decisions turned out well.

I think the addition of the fetus models helped to provide a sense of size. Holding them in my hand softens the image and makes it more relatable. Photoshopping them onto an image of the patient also provided a general sense of size that I though worked fine.

The addition of ultrasound imaging helped make the video relatable. I was surprised to find the ultrasound video choppy, and would have liked to prevent that artifact.

During the latter ultrasound clips, I added the sound of a fetal heartbeat, though it was not part of the original ultrasound. The sound of the heartbeat, I felt, added to video.