Taking photos of babies requires a little extra dose of patience and an ability to calm down the parents when they are worried about their crying baby. Despite the best efforts by my clients to plan their photo session around the bub’s sleeping and feeding pattern, invariably, it never really works out the way they plan. Let me emphasise, it never does, sadly.
My job, therefore, as a photographer, is to ensure that parents are relaxed because they feel bad about me being there to take photos while their baby is not obliging! If it’s a very new born (less than a week old), the baby could just sleep all the way through. However, I tend to take photos when the bubs are more than a couple of weeks or a month or two old. Typically the following happens on the shooting day:
- Arrival of the photographer about 10 minutes before the appointment time (as long as Google Maps doesn’t give any bum-steer)
- The photographer will have a quick look around the client’s home for natural light and the continuous studio lighting positions
- Lighting set up – this could take around 15 minutes
- While the mother fusses about the baby some snapping opportunities could present themselves so the photographer snaps away
- The photographer would either position the mom and the bub in a natural light spot or
- ask the mom to place the bub on the baby bean bag with the continuous lighting setup
- Shooting takes place for at least 30-45minutes
- The bub would require feeding in between
- The family goes out to backyard for a quick family portrait session or additional lights are set up for an indoor shoot.
- Additional candid images are captured
- Session ends
Now, from the first to the last items in the list, the bub could be crying all the way or constantly in between things: we can never tell when and for how long. That’s because despite our best effort to make things comfortable and normal for the baby, it’s still ‘strange’ and foreign to the kid when bright lights are set up and a stranger waves a big camera around the place. The baby does her/his thing according to their needs. The idea of ‘control’ goes out the window when you deal with babies. I just work with the flow with my own quirky sense of humour – if you know a bit about me you’d know what I mean by this. My shooting time could only be 30 minutes in total but scattered across 3 hours. Yes, it can be long and arduous. This was, indeed, a case with my session with Cas with his ‘rock & roll’ parents. I’m telling you that your baby will cry and that’s okay. That’s what babies do. No matter what happens we’ll have lovely pictures at the end.
If you can’t take my word for it just look at the photos from my meeting with Cas on Easter Sunday.
[wc_button type=”primary” url=”/gallery/family-baby-dh/” title=”baby and family portrait session” target=”blank” position=”float”]View photos of Cas and his parents [/wc_button]
