Photographing a baby - Beware, these are very cute!

Last week, a friend of mine asked me if I would photograph his 3 month old daughter. Without hesitation, I agreed to do this for him and his wife. I did so for many reasons, first of all, he is a friend and I wanted to give them some nice images of their daughter and secondly I wanted to photograph a young child, which I really have not done that much of recently. My kids are teenagers and it has been  long time since I have captured images of a cute little baby!

I asked my friends to bring some different changes of clothes and some of the babies blankets.  We started with this cuddly little outfit, which was too darned cute on her!

I shot these images at f4 with one softbox. I adjusted the lighting and white balance in post and used the "Portraiture" software from Imagenomic to smooth her skin. I am really amazed at how the skin smoothing plug-in can have such a great affect even on a baby's skin.

I just loved capturing the innocense in her eyes.

Then we changed to this red outfit and shot some more images. Personally, I liked the other outfit better, but the color really pops in this image.

And...of course...you can't do baby pictures without taking some shots of them in their birthday suits. 

On the two images above, I turned the camera at a 45 degree angle to get some different looks to the images. I like these two shots because, with the angle of the shot, she really fills the frame.

And then, towards the end of the photo session, we did one last change of clothes and handed her a favorite toy. I had dad right behind me to draw her attention towards the lens (while mom hung on to her from behind) and got this image.

Lastly, we had mom put out her hand (with the ring in full view) and had her daughter hold on to her finger. I really like this image, since it shows the comparative size of mom and her daughter. I think that the black and white treatment accentuates the simplicity of the photo.

(Photographers note: All of these images were taken on a high table so that all of us adults could do what we needed to do, from a comfortable position. For all of the images where she is sitting up, I made sure that one of the parents was holding her from behind, so that she would not fall forward and off the table! In the first 4 images of this blog entry, I used Adobe Photoshop to edit out the parent's hand, which was to the right of the child (and to our left).