Newborn session

Newborns in the first five to fourteen days still curl into the positions they held before birth and sleep deeply enough to be moved gently between set-ups. After about three weeks they straighten out, wake more often and the photographs become baby portraits rather than newborn ones — still lovely, and a different picture from the one most people are booking. This is the narrowest window of any service here, which is why the session is usually booked during pregnancy and dated afterwards.

Two things make the difference on the day, and neither is photographic. Turn the heat up to around 78°F an hour beforehand, because a warm room is what lets a newborn stay asleep through being moved. And have a feed ready. Everything else — wraps, props, backdrops — is brought to you, and the two-hour window exists precisely so that feeding and settling happen inside the session rather than eating it.

The session runs at the baby’s pace and nothing about that is negotiable, which is worth saying plainly to parents who are anxious about it going wrong. A newborn who needs forty minutes to feed and settle takes forty minutes; the window was built for that. Nothing is rushed and nothing is forced into a pose. The positions that require a baby to be held in place are done with a parent hands-on, and safety is not a feature of this service, it is the constraint it is designed around.

Thirty-five retouched photographs arrive within seven business days — longer than the other family services, because newborn skin needs careful, slow colour work rather than a batch preset. The gallery covers the baby alone, with parents and with siblings, and the frames of a five-day-old hand against an adult one are the ones almost every family prints. From $425, in your home, anywhere in the metro.