When Should You Get Newborn Photos Done? Top Tips For The Best Session

You’re having a baby on Martha’s Vineyard and you’re thinking about newborn photos to capture these fleeting days? Newborn photography is my specialty and my passion (along with birth) and I welcome the opportunity and honor to meet your baby in their first days and weeks of life.

A lot goes on when you have a new baby. If you’re the birthing parent, your body has just been literally opened up to put forth new life. You are exhausted, smitten, overwhelmed, exhausted (yes, twice). If you are not the birthing parent, you are just as smitten and just as exhausted. So, sometimes you have contacted me ahead of time about photos, and sometimes it’s an idea after the birth.

If you contact me ahead of your baby’s birth, I will typically pencil in your due date and ask you to be in touch when the baby is born and we will solidify a date for your session. If you did not contact me ahead of time (and we didn’t have the opportunity to do maternity photos), not to worry! I typically leave room in my schedule for last-minute newborn sessions and we can make it happen. If you are more interested in lifestyle or in-home sessions, not all of this information about timing applies, but can still be useful for planning your newborn photo session.

So the conventional wisdom around ideal timing for a newborn session is that having your session within the first two weeks after birth is ideal. That is because a newborn baby is still very squishy and will sleep through much of the posing that happens. But I can’t emphasize enough that all babies are different and that I take great care to follow your baby’s lead when it comes to their readiness and willingness to cooperate for any particular pose or activity during our session. Sessions very often take several hours because there is much soothing and feeding in the midst of the photos. So although that is the ideal, it is not the rule at all.

Days 1-5 of your baby’s life, I do not recommend a session. Babies and parents are still healing, still adjusting to a wildly different world, still getting the hang of feeding. Stay home and snuggled.

Days 7-12 are the sweet spot for me. Babies have the tiniest bit of consistency to their eating, they know they’re in the bright new world (though they may still confuse night and day), and they are still very curly and sleepy, so all the newborn photos that emphasize their sweet little features and how recently they were folded entirely up inside the womb are more possible.

But all babies are different - and the relationship between birth date and due date can also make a difference (for example, babies born early can have a larger adjusted window of newborn-sleepy). At this age, you might get a wide awake baby and you might get a fast asleep baby (and you might get both in the same session, as I do have some tricks of the trade to get a baby to sleep) - and I can roll with whatever the baby brings me to get you photos you will treasure.

A “newborn” session is still possible even if your baby is 1-2 months old, in fact. Babies this age often still like to be swaddled and wrapped (and mayyyyyybe even pose more unwrapped). Again there might be wide awake eyes or a sleepy baby (as these paired images show).

If we can’t do your newborn session before 6-8 weeks or so, I typically will recommend that we wait until 3 months at that point. I have wrapped my own baby up when she was 12 weeks old and done “newborn-style” sessions up to that age, but I typically suggest waiting for a 3 month session when we can take advantage of their increased alertness and smiles and stronger neck control to do a milestone session.

If you have (or are going to have) a newborn on Martha’s Vineyard and you’re looking for photos, I’d love to hear from you!