When it comes to siblings and newborns in the studio, of course you’re going to want pictures of them together and the images can be the perfect time to capture the start of a life long friendship.

However when the big brother or sister is still quite small themselves, then there’s a few things I recommend in order to get the shot right with the minimum of fuss.

The first is that if your little one is under five, you get dropped off with your new arrival and then dad takes your older child off to do something far more interesting for an hour or so.  This allows us to relax and capture your newborn images – newborn sessions are fairly long and boring for a little one to endure and that boredom can mean that they aren’t willing to play along when their turn comes to get in front of the camera.  Therefore we get a better success rate (and you have a more relaxing session) if they join us at the end when they are fresh and the whole experience is still fun for them.  The reason that we don’t do it at the start of the session normally is that it can take a while to get your newborn nicely settled in the studio and trying to take sibling pictures when both kids are unsettled is kind of like spinning plates.  I find it’s best to get one fast asleep and and then we’re just working with one person at a time!

When your older child is too little to safely hold and support your newborn or at least to hold them in a way that will work for a photo, I’m a big fan of this shot.  They can lay safely on the floor and get nice and close without any pressure to be ‘in charge’ of the baby. It let’s us get the shot with minimal stress – and as a side note, we’ll only be showing the top half of them so if they really don’t want to take off their favourite wellington boots, it doesn’t matter one jot!