Check Out This Country Music Couple’s Fairy-Tale Family Maternity Shoot
Country music sweethearts Thomas Rhett and Lauren Gregory Atkins are expecting a baby girl in August, and their family maternity shoot couldn’t be sweeter.
In the July 7 shoot, held on the couple’s farm outside Nashville, Tenn., Gregory Atkins, 27 (who is due in August), is wearing an ethereal white maternity gown, and her blond hair in a half-braid; Rhett, 27, wears his signature tattered jeans and a green T-shirt. The best part: Daughter Willa Gray Atkins, 20 months, whom the couple recently adopted from Uganda, steals the limelight in a white sundress and a pale pink headband.
“That day, the weather was in the 90s so we shot Willa first,” photographer Julie Paisley, 46, tells Yahoo Style. “She was so adorable and she kept repeating everything we said. When she was tired of being photographed, she said, ‘All done.’”
Paisley met the “Die a Happy Man” singer and his wife at Gregory Atkins’s sister’s wedding in October, for which she was the photographer. “I knew Thomas Rhett’s songs but had no idea he was the bride’s brother-in-law,” says Paisley. “Someone informed me at the reception.”
For a while, Gregory Atkins had been undecided about a maternity shoot — “She said, ‘Do we really need one?’” says Paisley — however, a few months after the wedding she texted the photographer and said, “OK, let’s do it.”
After the shoot was rescheduled three different times due to rain, the 45-minute session finally took place. The couple’s instructions: Act like themselves. Not a difficult feat, given they’ve known each other since the sixth grade, reports People.
“They’re so down-to-earth,” says Paisley, adding that the couple included their two dogs Cash and Kona in the shoot. “I ended up using Photoshop to remove the dogs from some of the photos because they kept running in the background,” says Paisley.
Afterward, as the couple trudged back to the farm, says Paisley, Rhett warned everyone, “Check for ticks!”
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