How Does Documentary Newborn Photography Work? | Austin Newborn Photographer
It’s the first days of your tiny babe’s life on earth. You’re adjusting to this new rhythm, or lack of it. Your baby cries a lot, or maybe not much at all. Even though they sleep all the time you seem to be constantly busy, feeding, changing, bouncing, feeding, cleaning, bouncing, burping. You spend your “free time” staring at this little stranger you love so inexplicably. They have impossibly tiny hairs on their ears. wrinkles and folds in odd places, they smell divine. It’s sweet and it’s blissful. Hard and confusing. Everything you’ve always wanted and nothing that you expected. You’re bleeding and raw and your body hurts, but also your heart, from expanding so divinely. You want to remember. It’s a haze. You know you’ll only be able to hang on to the blurry outlines.
So you hire a photographer to make you a story, a document of this time that will go so fast and so slow at the same time.
At the appointed time the photographer arrives at your house. She comes in quietly and takes off her shoes, her camera is slung around her neck. She introduces herself. You were just finishing up washing your face, and the tiny one is asleep in the bassinet. Click. When he wakes, his dad changes him and gives him a bottle - click - and you all head outside to enjoy some time under the trees in the sunshine. The little guy snoozes and snuffles in the hot breeze. Click. He’s taking in all the new sensations of the world. Click. And the old dog - your first baby - sniffs around and gets to know his little brother - Click.
Back inside for bath time, a new diaper. Click, Click. Nap time is approaching for the whole family. You throw on your comfiest nursing pajamas, and get skin to skin with your little one in bed. Click. You feel like you might be getting the hang of this breastfeeding thing, but it’s still hard and awkward sometimes. Click. Then the latch. Click. Baby quiets, suckles, settles. Click. He’s asleep. You will soon follow.
The photographer whispers her goodbye and slips out the door. Click.
