Client confessions
An honest account of newborn photography
By Pearl Cross
Life with children is nothing like the pretty pictures. here is my honest account of newborn photography.
The fact that our precious bundle, at twelve days old, projectile pooped in a decorative suitcase serves as an accurate metaphor for those first few months.
The morning spent getting ready for the photo shoot had beaten me. My sticky state of overwhelm was mostly due to the too-tight jeans, the lopsided breasts (he only fed on the left), and the inescapable heat of an adhesive baby boy and tangled blow dryer.
My husband and I took turns shoving random piles of baby paraphernalia under the beds and arguing over whether the smell in our house was one of sour milk or dirty laundry.
But alas, Lisa arrived at our door with hands overflowing, offering a light-hearted laugh which suggested that she had seen it all before.
Placing her Camera comfortably on a pile of unfolded washing, she looked at me and said:
“Congratulations! And don’t you worry about a thing. Everything that’s happening right now, the chaos, the emotions, they’re all totally normal. And beautiful. Let’s try and capture that today.”
With an unexpected exhalation, I gave up on my secretly unfinished mission of shoving a pair of sports socks into my right bra cup.
Everything will be fine, I think.
The photo shoot didn’t go as planned- our son was in a rotten mood and as such was impossible to coerce into many of the cutesy poses I had envisioned/googled prior. He screamed, he squirmed, he DEMANDED my milk with tireless conviction!
As for my husband, torn between slight amusement and complete humiliation, well I should probably admit that he had agreed to the newborn photos against his will.
My other half is not one for photographs, especially “posed” ones, and it took a good hour for his strained smirk to gradually soften into a natural smile. Lisa eventually won him over, and they shot the breeze happily while I nursed and tried desperately to stop sweating.
In truth, we had nothing at all to worry about.
'A few weeks later, the photos arrived, and they were stupendous.'
They were nothing like the ones I had sought out to achieve- they were in fact much better.
The flustered nursing photos had been cleverly cropped to focus on tiny clutched fingers. Attention had been drawn to the tenderness within the chaos, the quiet in between.
This was life for us then: under slept, unprepared, and unexpectedly gorgeous.
We will be forever grateful to Lisa, for putting us all at ease and capturing these fleeting moments in our lives. I can’t wait to see how she captures our next little arrival- due any day now and sure to be just as wild as her little brother.
With love and laughter,
