Newborn Portrait Session | Silver Spring, Maryland
What does a Newborn Portrait Session look like?
Congratulations! You’re having a baby and you’d like to have a Newborn portrait session once baby arrives. Well, you’ve come to the right place! Let’s talk about the how the Newborn Portrait session works and look at one of the latest sessions that we had in the studio so you know what kind images to expect.
Honestly, the best time to think about booking a newborn portrait session is in the second trimester. You still feel like you have energy and you can put in the time and research to find the perfect photographer that works for your style. Booking before baby comes also helps your stress after baby arrives, because it’s one less thing you have to think about. It’s just already set up and ready to go. I love when clients book consultations before baby arrives so we can really plan out the session in detail and also get to know each other a little before working together.
When you book a newborn portrait session with me, I’m very upfront about the schedule and how I run my sessions. We usually start off with parent images and then flow into the individual baby portraits, unless there are siblings, in which case we start with those. I’m very calm and chill during the session, and I make sure that everyone is relaxed so that no one comes out looking frazzled in their final images. The session is around 3 hours long, but it really depends on your baby, sometimes it can be longer and sometimes shorter.
I always have a ton of options as far as props and backdrops go. Like I always tell my clients, if there is a color that you want to use during your newborn portrait session and I don’t have it, I will gladly get it for you! I have so many little outfits and bonnets and wraps and headbands and, and, and the list just keeps going! There is always something that someone falls in love with! (Usually its the tiny little stuffies that baby holds in the individual portraits, lol!)
Parent posing is always my favorite, because there is just so much love in the room and I love capturing it for people to have forever! The snuggles with mom and baby, how mom just melts into the poses. The way that the dads tend to hold baby as if they will break at any second. It’s just always so sweet. The images with both parents and the baby, forget it! The way that partners who just went through the most incredible experience together look at each other makes me want to cry. It’s just so beautiful!
Then we move into baby alone posing. Most parents like a combination of wrapped and naked images, which is my personal preference as well. That we we can get a nice variety to fill your newborn portrait session gallery and you have lots of images to choose from. The amount of poses we do really depends on how sleepy your baby is. Sometimes babies sleep straight through the whole thing and we get a ton of different poses, and sometimes they are very touchy and it’s harder to move them around.
I want to be very clear, that more than anything else at your Newborn Portrait session, my priority is your babies safety. More than “getting the shot” of getting more of a variety. So I move at a slower pace and I make sure that baby is secure in any pose I put them in. I’m also very careful with making sure the props and studio is clean and I use a lot of hand sanitizer and I wear a mask. Newborns have very little immune systems and are susceptible to so many viruses!
Let’s look at an actual Newborn Portrait Session.
This was a returning client. We had done portraits with big brother when he was six months old, so I was so excited for them to come back and I could see how much he grew!
Little baby girl did a fantastic job with the sibling images and family images and the first few parent images. Then she started getting frustrated and we were only able to get a couple more poses done. At that point mom and dad were exhausted, I don’t blame them they have a little toddler and a brand new baby! I had an opening the next week and I offered to have them come back, without big brother (a lot easier!), and we can get the remaining images. And that’s exactly what we did!
With all my clients, I want them to be happy. Especially when we do a Newborn Portrait Session and parents are so tired and so overwhelmed, I just want to help where I can. I think this was actually the first time I had clients come back, but it was well worth it! Between the two different Newborn portrait sessions we got a beautiful gallery and mom and dad were thrilled with the results! They chose to print an heirloom album to match the one they have from big brother, and I’m sure they will cherish it for many many years to come!
