Little Jacob here was a bit over the age that I’d recommend for a newborn photo shoot and so we scheduled a baby photo shoot for him instead.

Newborn photography really does need to take place in your baby’s first two weeks and for preference between 5 and 10 days old for maximum sleepiness and Jacob was nearly four weeks before he had a chance to visit the studio with his mum.  Generally this means that he will be awake for most if not all of his session and also, as he will have unfurled, those tummy tuck positions aren’t possible for him.

That doesn’t mean of course that there aren’t great pictures that we can create with a more wakeful baby and it’s actually kind of lovely to see his bright and shining eyes in the pictures. If you wait to schedule your session until your baby is between 6 and 8 weeks old, you might also capture some of those very first smiles as well.

As I’m always saying, there’s just no predicting what a baby will do and lucky for us, he was in the mood for sleeping through some of his portrait session so we kind of had the best of both worlds.  Even if he hadn’t though, we’d still have had great photos of his time when he was still tiny.