Lifestyle Newborn Photography, and Why I Shoot It That Way

Most of my newborn mornings start the same way. A front door opens, the kettle goes on, somebody's still in a dressing gown, and a baby is asleep on a shoulder in the middle of it all.

That's lifestyle newborn photography, and it's the only way I shoot newborns. I come to your house in those first weeks, work with the light you already have, and photograph your family in the rooms where the whole thing is actually happening.

If you're weighing up what kind of session you'd like, my page on newborn photography in Sydney has the practical detail. What follows is what a morning at your place is really like.

What a morning of lifestyle newborn photography looks like

I usually arrive somewhere between 9 and 10, once you've had a chance to get through a feed and the light in the main rooms has gone soft.

For the first 20 minutes or so I photograph almost nothing. I take my shoes off, ask where you've been sitting at 3am, and find the window you both keep drifting towards.

Then I start where the baby already is. On the end of your bed, in the nursery chair, in that patch of light near the kitchen door.

Sessions run about 2 hours, and the pace stays slow, which is easier to hold in your own house.

Your home is already the set

Families often apologise for the washing basket. I quite like it in the corner of a frame.

A house in week 2 has a particular look to it. Muslins over the arm of the couch, a bassinet pulled close to one side of the bed, cards still standing on the mantelpiece.

That's the season you're in, and it dates the photographs in the loveliest way.

My styling amounts to moving a bright plastic toy out of shot, switching off a lamp so the window does the work, and smoothing one corner of the bedding. Everything else stays exactly where you put it.

I work with the light your windows give me

Natural light is the whole method, which is why the timing of the morning matters more than anything I could carry in with me.

Most homes have 2 or 3 hours where one room goes properly soft. In a west-facing lounge, that's late afternoon. In the east-facing bedrooms I see in houses all around the Hills District, it's usually mid-morning, and that's my favourite hour of the day to work.

When you book, I'll ask which way your main rooms face and where the sun lands mid-morning. It sounds like a fussy question, and it's the one that shapes how the whole gallery feels.

Feeding and settling are part of the session

A fair slice of those 2 hours is feeding, changing, winding and settling. I plan for it.

When your baby needs a feed, you feed. I either keep photographing quietly from further back, or I put the camera down and let the room be a room for a while.

Some of the frames families love most come out of those breaks. A hand cupped around the back of a head. A partner hovering with a muslin. A toddler climbing up mid-feed, because that's where everyone is.

Where studio newborn sessions fit

Studio newborn photography is a genuine craft. The wrapped, posed, deeply asleep images take years of skill and real patience to do safely and well, and plenty of families want exactly that on the wall.

What I offer sits alongside it. Your rooms, your light, your baby awake or asleep or having a grumble, and you in the frame as you are in that fortnight.

Both are worth having. If the posed studio look is the one you've been picturing, I'm glad to point you towards photographers I rate.

What helps the morning run gently

Warm the house up past what's comfortable for you. Warm babies settle, and a settled baby gives me room to move around you.

Put your lightest bedding on the bed: white, cream, oat, soft grey. It's the biggest reflector in your house.

Wear what you feel like yourself in. Soft knits, plain colours, bare feet, hair however it is.

If you'd like a few frames in mind beforehand, I've gathered some newborn photoshoot ideas that suit a house rather than a studio.

The weeks that suit a lifestyle newborn session

The 5 to 14 day window gives you that curled, sleepy, brand new look, and it's the most popular time for lifestyle newborn sessions.

I'm just as glad to come at 4 or 5 weeks, when your baby starts holding eye contact and your older kids have stopped tiptoeing. Those galleries feel more like family portraits with a newborn in them, and some families love that version more.

I go through the timing properly in my post on when to book newborn photos, including how it works when your baby arrives early or late.

The frames families keep

When I deliver a gallery, I can usually pick the images that'll end up printed. They're almost always the ones where somebody moved.

A mum looking down instead of at me. A dad's hands, enormous around 2 small feet. A 3-year-old's face 5 centimetres from her sister's, because that's how close she wanted to be.

Photographs like that hold up. In 15 years your daughter will know that lounge room, that light coming through those windows, the blanket that lived on the back of that couch.

And you'll remember how heavy she was, asleep on your chest at 10 in the morning, in a house that smelled like toast.