Baby Noah
Mar, 2015Views
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Behind The Lens
Location
I took this photo in my home studio, based in Danbury, Connecticut. I'm very fortunate to be in a beautiful Victorian home with gorgeous windows that bring soft, natural light into the studio space.Time
The image was taken mid-day, at about 11am. I always recommend to my clients to start our newborn sessions at this time, for two main reasons. 1) Babies are naturally quite sleepy and cooperative in the morning, and 2) the light coming into my southern-facing studio is very soft and perfectly diffused during this time of day.Lighting
The baby was wrapped in my lap and then gently placed on a posing beanbag. The studio windows wrap around one side of the room, so I placed him down with the nearest window directly above the top of his head, and the far windows on the left, parallel to his body. This position makes for excellent light that softly falls down the face, while the windows at the far wall add the perfect amount of fill light from the left of the image.Equipment
I shoot with a Nikon D3 (a choice left over from my wedding days!) and all Sigma lenses... here I used the Sigma 50mm 1.4 Art lens. I adore Sigma lenses for their affordability and quality- the 50mm 1.4 Art is truly a superb piece of glass! No other equipment was needed for this particular image, and I love that. I really feel that less is more when it comes to newborn photography.Inspiration
When creating newborn images, I love echoing the comfortable nature of the womb. I often pose newborns in positions that are fetal in nature, and prefer these images over ones that don't occur naturally in newborns (such as the head in hands/froggy pose, or with props like glasses and school desks). There's something about a womb-like image that I find very beautiful. It serves as a reminder of the miracle of life!Editing
Most of my newborn images don't require much post-processing. For all images, this one included, I run a a very light skin filter using Imagenomic Portraiture, and I lower the contrast for an extra soft look. I also used the Liquify tool to remove a couple of extra little bumps in the wrap that were distracting from the baby. Then I converted to black and white, and voila!In my camera bag
My Nikon D3 body is a trooper, and I use it for everything. I originally selected it for its amazing low light performance for weddings, but it's a great choice for the studio as well. All of my lenses are Sigma, however, because they won me over when I first tried out their 50mm 1.4 Art lens and I never looked back! I use the 50 almost exclusively for newborn sessions, with the exception of my 105mm 2.8 macro for beautiful details of fingers and eyelashes! In most cases, that's all I use for newborns, but I have a ton of other wonderful items to play with for other sessions. My 70-200mm 2.8 is great for family portraits and weddings, the 24-70mm 2.8 is especially helpful in studio when I have a toddler who is determined to be on the go, and I even have an 8-16mm that I get to play with sometimes for a really fun fish-eye effect! For studio lighting, I have an AB800 paired with a 64" PLM, and a few reflectors. I love the one-light set up as it's classic and easy to travel with if need be. There's much more than just that, but those are the toys that come out to play most often.Feedback
Sometimes to get these tight, squishy poses, it's best to have your posing beanbag a bit deflated. This way, you can create a little dip for the baby to lay in, which also cradles around his body so he stays very secure and comfortable. The beanbag is then layered with several blankets, which eliminates any would-be folds or wrinkles in the flokati. I first wrapped the baby by laying him on the wrap fabric and crisscrossing it over his body, then wrapping both end pieces around him diagonally from the right, which gives this particular wrap pattern a cute angle to it. Once he was comfortable, I placed him in the dip I had created, and gently put a few hand towels underneath all the blankets to secure him even more and prevent him from kicking out of the wrap. The other nice thing about creating a dip in the beanbag is that the baby is able to sink in and curl into an even tighter position, so we can really see just how tiny he is at just a few days old! Now that he was nice and secure, I was able to pose his head and hands, smooth out any extra wrinkles in the flokati, and take the shot. This is a great pose because you can get many different kinds of looks just by changing your angle and spinning the beanbag to change the direction of the light. Meanwhile, the baby is comfortable so he's happy to be sleeping while we're snapping away!
