Newborn photography is HARD work! It’s one thing to take photographs of predictable adults who are even tempered and a completely different thing to take photographs of a newborn. Nothing about them is predictable. They cry when they want and you can’t reason with them, you can try to soothe them but it may not actually work… They sleep when they want and they’re awake when they want. Little Maylee was no exception. She’s an extremely well tempered newborn all things considered. Statistically, most newborns cry on average 8 hours a day. Not Maylee. She’s super content and super chill so the struggle wasn’t getting her to stop crying, it was to get her to stop moving! Oh how Maylee LOVES to squirm! She likes to be aware and involved and just gets so excited to be ALIVE! So we spent probably half of our time trying to get her to zonk out.

After a long time, we had success. But then the next trick is all those little fingers and little details. A hand can make or break a photograph but every time a finger got moved, she’d stir! It just takes a lot of patience and time working with newborns. Having a nice warm room is super helpful too.

Here’s a little sneak peek of behind the scenes:

I was getting a little more shadow than I cared for so I had a one flash set up, flash pointing straight to the ceiling with no modifiers to just create a little more light. A lot of the times we also used a white reflector. Under Maylee is a boppy nursing pillow. You can do so many things with one of those! We didn’t use it for every shot, but we used it for most. As far as camera settings and lens… I shoot exclusively with the Sigma Art 35mm f1.4 and the Canon 100mm f2.0 and there’s a pretty even mixture of both lenses in the gallery. And camera settings. The biggest deal is aperture. You set that where you want it and adjust your ISO and shutter to accommodate. The first few close ups I shot at about a f2.5 but the rest were at f3.5 or f4.0. I wanted all her facial features to be in focus and that just wouldn’t be possible at f 2.0.