Hala & Abe's Cleveland Maternity Session at the Italian Cultural Gardens and Museum of Art

Some sessions are built around one location and one look. Hala and Abe's maternity session was built around two, and the distance between them turned out to be the most interesting part of the afternoon. We started in the Italian Cultural Gardens, where the stonework disappears into ivy and hydrangea, and finished on the marble terraces around the Cleveland Museum of Art, where everything opens up into long sightlines and clean geometry.

It was mid-August, the greens were at their heaviest, and the two of them were easy company — the kind of couple who keep drifting back toward each other between frames without being asked. That instinct is what most of these pictures are actually about.

Maternity Photos at the Italian Cultural Gardens

The Italian garden is one of the most photogenic corners of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens, and it rewards patience. Carved balustrades, a broad flight of worn stone steps, benches tucked into planting beds, and a fountain that throws spray into whatever light is coming through the trees. Nothing there is grand on its own; it accumulates.

We worked our way down the garden rather than staging it. Abe led Hala down the stone staircase, they settled onto one of the benches, and the light kept sliding through the canopy in patches. Shooting under trees like this means chasing pockets of shade where the light is even, then letting the dappled edges frame the picture instead of ruining it.

The fountain gave us the loosest frames of the day. Backlit spray reads like static in the air, and when it caught the late sun the whole scene went soft and bright around them. We also took a few quiet detail frames — her hands and his, resting together — because those tend to be the images people keep closest later.

A Second Look at the Cleveland Museum of Art

A short drive later, everything changed. Hala switched into a brighter floral dress, Abe into black, and we traded ivy and shadow for white marble, open lawn and the long reflecting lagoon in the Fine Arts Garden. The Cleveland Museum of Art gives you scale — columns, terraces, a classical fountain with sculpted figures — and portraits made there carry a formality the garden simply can't produce.

Wide-open space asks for different photographs. Instead of tucking them into a frame of leaves, we used the architecture as a straight line behind them and let the negative space do the work. A few steps back and the fountain and manicured lawn read like a stage set; a few steps in and it's just the two of them again.

The last stretch happened on the museum steps. They sat down, stopped performing entirely, and the frames got warmer as the light dropped — the sort of end-of-session pictures that only arrive once everyone has stopped thinking about the camera.

Why These Two Cleveland Locations Work So Well Together

They sit minutes apart in University Circle, which is the practical answer: one session, two entirely different sets, no long drive eating into the good light. But the better answer is that they balance each other. The Italian Cultural Gardens are intimate, textured and slightly overgrown — every frame is close, warm and enclosed. The museum grounds are open, symmetrical and monumental. Put a gallery together from only one of them and it starts to repeat itself. Put them side by side and the same afternoon reads as a range.

The thread holding them together is the couple, not the backdrop. Same light, same afternoon, same easy way the two of them stand together, so the shift in setting registers as variety rather than as two unrelated sessions stapled into one album.

That is more or less how we approach portraits generally: pick locations that give a session somewhere to go, work with the light that's actually there, and then stay out of the way long enough for people to be themselves in front of it. Hala and Abe made that part easy.