It’s funny how it is through my career in photography that I get to handle infants. More so now compared during the time where I used to work directly with kids as a teacher! There’s truly a different set of skills to learn and be aware of with handling children and babies of different age groups and even with that, every child has different temperaments!
At Stories, I have had the wonderful privilege to photograph and document relationships between parents and baby. Every shoot is a new experience as every individual is different and more often than not, I rely a lot on my intuition to navigate through the differences. Just want to share with you some thoughts I have concerning photographing newborn babies and slightly older infants.
Typically, it takes a longer time to photograph newborns, since the success of a session is hugely based on the baby’s mood. However, don’t get frustrated if your baby is not calm during the session, it’s normal! This is why we often take short breaks in between for the baby to feed or to calm down. It takes patience, not only from us, but also from the parents. At this age, newborns are typically quite flexible. So this is the best time to do the sleepy baby shots. Because newborns are so delicate and precious, I make sure that I always wash my hands and clip my nails before every newborn session.
As we will photograph the newborn naked, we normally have the air-conditioning or fan switched off. So be prepared to sweat it out a little bit! Also, if you have outfits for your newborn, we recommend that the outfits should fit them, otherwise, fitting something that looks too big for the newborn will look quite strange. We recommend also for the parents to come dressed up a little, so we can photograph them with their precious baby.
While photographing newborns doesn’t require a lot of interaction, shooting slightly older babies does. I love it when they smile at their parents while talking or playing, and that’s where we will normally try to capture that on camera. I normally ask if the baby is able to sit or do tummy time so I could plan the kind of shots that I can do. As older babies can react, we can even get creative by letting the baby hold a cold fruit, or allow them to taste a sour fruit for their reaction. Depending on the age of the infant, they may not necessarily look at the camera and smile. But we will try our best!
Credits:
Photographer: Diane
Location: Stories Studio