Newborn Baby & Parent Photo Ideas

You’ve just welcomed a newborn baby to the family and you’re desperate to get some professional photos with them, but you hate being in front of the camera. Do you just sacrifice the opportunity, or do you find a photographer who knows how to work with you to ensure you still get some treasured memories of you and your baby when they’re at their smallest? In this blog post, we take a look at just a few of the newborn baby & parent photo ideas that work really well, whatever your comfort level in front of the camera.

Proud as punch new parents pose for a photo with their baby daughter

Confidence (or Lack of) in Front of the Camera

As a photographer of many genres, one of the things I hear most (along with “Can you make me look slim?!”) as I go about my day-to-day business is “I hate having my picture taken!” It’s just a fact of life that some people love being in front of the camera and some just don’t. If I’m photographing someone’s wedding day, there’s usually plenty of time (and more often than not a little – occasionally quite a lot – of alcohol) to ease people’s nerves about such matters. If all else fails, I can just pop on my long lens and shoot from the back of the room. With newborn sessions, it’s perhaps slightly different.

We always go out of our way to try to assure you that it’s perfectly normal and completely fine for Baby to need some calming, some soothing, a feed or three (particularly for breast-fed babies) and a bum change or two during a session in order to keep them happy. We are totally used to it, and we expect it to happen. That’s why we allocate 3 hours to our newborn sessions. But, for the parent, this lack of co-operation, however short-lived, can still add to the tension of the situation.

Now, ask that same parent, who also hates having their picture taken, to step in front of the camera, and it might all become too much. But it doesn’t have to be like that. There are a whole range of shots that we can take that put you in the picture without your face being visible (which for most people seems to be the issue).

I’ve started generating a black-background edit from my white wall group shots, which is proving to be really popular with new parents

Camera-Confident Newborn Baby & Parent Photo Ideas

For those of you who take the idea of someone pointing a camera at you completely in your stride, we do obviously have a few more options available to us.

In Front of the Camera, Front Lit

The current newborn studio setup doesn’t give us a huge amount of space for full-length shots of you and your family, so we tend to concentrate on tighter crops on your collective torsos, usually from waist up (or, if there are a lot of you, mid-thigh up).

It’s always nice to incorporate a newborn’s siblings into pictures during the newborn photo session

More often than not, we shoot against a white wall, but there are a few vinyl backdrop options, too.

A red vinyl backdrop is one of the alternatives to the white wall available for parent and newborn shots in my studio

We can work through a range of poses.

In Front of the Camera, Back Lit

A shot that we’ve added to the repertoire most recently involves placing a large softbox behind you and losing quite a lot of the detail of your faces in the shadows that are created.

Generally speaking, these shots seem to work best in black and white. You will often find you receive two different crops, particularly where we bring your heads together. The first will be a wider angle, rectangular crop, where we allow the light from the softbox to fill the edges of the frame.

Rectangular-cropped backlit-shot from a parents and newborn photo shoot – Newborn Baby & Parent Photo Ideas

The second is a square crop, where we darken the corners, creating more of a silhouetted, intimate feel.

Square cropped silhouette-effect shot from a parent and newborn photo shoot.

Less Camera-Confident Newborn Baby & Parent Photo Ideas

Over-the-Shoulder

This is a shot that can be done a couple of ways, but the basic premise is that it’s shot looking over your shoulder with Baby’s head resting in your hands. It’s super cute if Baby is looking back at you, but it’s still really nice, even if they’ve got their eyes closed.

The over the shoulder shot is perfect for the less confident in front of the camera parents – Newborn Baby & Parent Photo Ideas

A nice variation that we’ve done on this before is to have both parents sitting next to one another, heads turned towards one another but with a gap big enough to still see Baby through. Whether your faces are in focus or not is up to you.

The parents’ glance over the shoulder shot works particularly well with twins – Newborn Baby & Parent Photo Ideas

Hands on Body

Again, there are a couple of different ways of doing this. One involves parents placing their hands around Baby’s head and bum/modesty, and the other sees parents with their hands on Baby’s sides. Since no faces (other than Baby’s) are pictured at all, these are perfect for even the most camera-shy of clients 😊 They are slightly more challenging the larger the baby, though!

Parents of a newborn boy place their hands on his body – Newborn Baby & Parent Photo Ideas

Parents of a newborn boy place their hands on either side of his body – Newborn Baby & Parent Photo Ideas

Holding Both Parents’ Hands

I always love this shot. It feels like a visual metaphor for how you (the parents) will support your baby now and always. It’s super easy to set up.

Holding both parents’ hands – Newborn Baby & Parent Photo Ideas

Hand-in-Hand-in-Hand

We always make a point of capturing some detailed shots of Baby’s hands, and another easy shot that we can make use of with camera-hating parents is the hand-in-hand-in-hand. Essentially, the parent with the largest hand places it on the bottom of the pile, then the parent with the smallest hand places that on top, and finally we place Baby’s hand on top of that.

Stacked hands – Newborn Baby & Parent Photo Ideas

Finger Holding

Babies love to grip on to things. If you unfurl their fingers and place their hand on top of your outstretched finger or thumb, it’s almost a given that they will latch on to it. It’s a super cute way of showing the bond between parent and Baby without needing to show your face.

A newborn baby girl grips her daddy’s thumb – Newborn Baby & Parent Photo Ideas

Hearts Around Hands or Feet

Another dead easy “pose” for the camera-shy newborn parent simply involves using your own hands to create a heart shape around either their hand or feet (I think it looks better with one hand but two feet).

A new mum uses her hands to create a heart shape around her newborn baby son’s hand – Newborn Baby & Parent Photo Ideas

A newborn baby born’s feet are cupped into a heart shape by his mum’s hands – Newborn Baby & Parent Photo Ideas

Conclusions

There are lots of ways to capture beautiful photographs and create lasting memories of you and your new baby no matter how comfortable you are in front of the camera. If you have ideas of your own, we’re always really happy to play around to try to turn them into a reality.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Take a look at the Newborn Baby Photography By Northamptonshire Newborn Photographer Karl Drage page for details of my newborn photography packages.

Check out the directory of Newborn Baby Photography Props, Fabrics & Backgrounds available for you to make use of in my studio.

Got a question about how the sessions work that’s not answered above? Check out the Newborn Photography Session FAQs.

You can find some 10-image sample galleries from previous newborn sessions on the Portfolio: Newborn Photography page.