Attach two facial reference photographs — female subject first, male subject second. Preserve both faces exactly: bone structure, skin tone, features, age.
Indian woman, 29, third trimester at approximately 34 weeks, standing three-quarter to camera, weight settled on her right leg. Indian man, 32, standing close behind her right shoulder, his chin lowered so his lips press against her temple with enough pressure to visibly compress the hair at her hairline. His eyes are closed. Her eyes are open and cast down toward her own hands — not at the camera. Her mouth is closed in a small involuntary smile that has reached the outer corners of her eyes.
She wears a fitted black ribbed cotton dress, long-sleeved. The rib knit is under real tension across the abdomen: the vertical ribs splay outward and widen as they cross the apex of the curve, then converge back to their natural spacing below the underside. Fine diagonal pull lines radiate from the sides of the abdomen toward the hip seams where the fabric is drawn tight. Where the knit is most stretched, across the highest point of the curve, the flattened fibres pick up a soft directional sheen. He wears an unstructured white linen shirt, sleeves rolled to mid-forearm, collar open.
Two hands only in the entire frame. Her left hand cradles the underside of the curve, fingers spread wide and pointing right, palm taking the weight — a black knit cuff and two thin gold bangles at her wrist. His right hand rests on the upper slope of the curve, fingers together and pointing left across her body, thumb tucked — a rolled white linen cuff at his wrist. The two sleeve colours make each arm's ownership immediately legible. Her right arm hangs relaxed at her side, hand out of frame. His left arm passes behind her waist, out of frame.
A thin gold mangalsutra rests in the hollow of her throat, small gold studs at her ears. The gold is the only warm colour in the image — everything else is black, white and skin.
The background is not a white surface — it is white light filling the air of a deep studio space, brightest directly behind their heads and falling to the faintest pearl grey at the lower frame corners.
Soft directional light from camera-left at forty-five degrees, slightly above her eye height. It builds a clearly lit plane on the left face of the abdomen and lets the right face of the curve fall into a soft grey shadow — the black fabric must hold visible tonal separation between its lit and shadowed planes, never crushing to a single flat black. A second soft light from behind camera-right skims a thin bright rim along her far shoulder, upper arm and the outer edge of the curve, separating the black dress cleanly from the white air behind it. Beneath the underside of the abdomen, where her hand supports it, sits a soft occlusion shadow — the darkest point in the frame and the element that gives the entire form its volume.
Skin rendered with visible pore texture, fine facial hair and natural variation. No retouching, no digital smoothing.
85mm, f/2.8, camera at her chin height, framed from mid-thigh up with the abdomen at frame centre and both faces filling the upper third. Minimal headroom. Ultra-photorealistic, fine film grain. No photography equipment visible in frame. 4:5 ratio image.
