A Baby Photography Session
For similar reason why I love taking portraits of children, I love taking portraits of babies - they are truly themselves. It’s a different level of living. For example, they stretch - and you can see that when they move their body, they don’t think about toys, meals or afternoon walk - they just feel it. They are 100% present, in the moment, living that moment. I’m trying to learn it from them 😉
Style
On one hand, I love the modern baby photography style - they look like in a dream in these curled up positions with all the beautiful props, sleeping, well, like babies. On the other hand, every baby looks the same like that. There is nothing unique, related to the baby. So it’s not really what I want to do much. I like the authenticity.
Authenticity to me means to visit baby at their home. There are their toys, their furniture, the rest of the family members. The photos don’t show just the baby, but also the space where the baby grows up - their home. And their siblings and parents. When I look at photos of me when I was a baby or a child, one experience is to see myself. And the whole other experience is to see the environment. I usually notice that a lot: “Ah, that was at granny’s place, I remember that clock… “ It brings more memories, more context. It’s not anonymous. It’s real.
How Did It Go
I was taking photos for almost three hours - with short breaks to get stuff ready, to let baby to feed and fall asleep and so on. I took around 600 photos, 150 I marked as “usable”. I’ve chosen 13 which I was really happy with and the client then chose another 13, in total 26 happy photos. And here are couple of my favourites:
The photo at the top: We tried different places and poses indoors, but the round shape of the swing chair on a balcony looked promising. After couple of minutes of trying different angles, the baby smiled 🥰 Must have been a nice dream.
And then, all of the sudden, the sun came out of the clouds! Normally, direct sunlight isn’t great for the portraits, but I loved the light/shade pattern on the chair. The colours were only distracting from the beauty of the play of lights so I removed them. And I had to bring a little bit of artificial light to the face in post production.
The inside space had plenty of nice places, but the colour combination of the old leather sofa and the plant was exquisite! I was trying to figure out the best composition, I took some photos in landscape mode and some in portrait mode. I had to change my lens because even when I moved furniture away from behind me, pushed my back on the wall, it was still too close for the 50 prime lens. I hade to swap to more wide angle.
When I was processing the photos, I loved the composition of this one, but both eyes were closed and it was a bit boring. On another photo, which was landscape, the baby opened one eye for a second to check inbetween two naps. I loved it. What a pity that I didn’t have that in the portrait mode! Well, Photoshop rules! I simply stacked the photos on top of each other and used the opened eye in the portrait composition. And here we go, perfect photo was born.
