Easy Baby Photography

Once you have gotten the hang of taking baby photographs, you might want to consider expanding your love of baby photography. If you’ve enjoyed seeing beautiful photos of your own baby, what’s to stop you from letting other people enjoy photos of their babies – photos that you took!? Well the answer is “not much!”. If you’ve followed my advice on this site and have practiced taking photos of your own baby, you will definitely have some good experience under your belt.

But how do you market yourself, you ask? Well that’s a good question. Newborn baby photography is a type of photography that many people don’t normally think about hiring a professional to do the job. This is ok though, it is not impossible or even too terribly difficult to break into the market. Parents love their kids and a large portion of their income is spent on their kids. This is especially true at the beginning when they first have a baby because it is all new and exciting. The goal here is NOT to take advantage of parents, but rather this is just something to understand about the market. Parents love their kids and will do a lot for them. I’ll repeat, parents love their kids and will do a lot for them. You don’t have to feel like you’re taking advantage of the parents. Instead, you can understand that they actually want to have adorable photos of their babies, just like you do! You are providing a very valuable service to them.

I suggest putting out an ad in the newspaper telling the world that you are willing to do baby photography. You can create a website promoting your services. You can tell friends and family that you can do baby photography. Once people know about it and see the wonderful work that you produce, you’ll start to get a trickle of requests, which will in turn turn into a downpour of requests. Word of mouth is one of the best ways to advertise, it’s free! Just make sure that you keep your clients happy by providing excellent service and wonderful customer support. Bend over backwards to do anything they ask and be very friendly. This will allow them to highly recommend you to other people and will provide you with a steady stream of clients.

The most important part to all of this is to make sure you are having fun. If it’s no fun for you to shoot other people’s babies, then don’t do it! Just stay at home and enjoy photographing your own babies. If you do it right however, it can be very fulfilling to photograph other people and their babies.

Once you have lots of great photos of your baby, it’s a great idea to share them with other people. Making a baby photo album is probably one of the best ways to do this. You can make it yourself or order it online. There are many places online that will let you upload your photos, organize them into a book, and then have the company print it and mail it to you. These will be photos that will be printed right into the book, not pictures that are put into a book. If you want to just buy a photo album that will let you put physical prints of your photos into it, that is a great method too. You can just simply go to Walmart and buy a nice looking photo album and place your photos in it. You’ll have to print off your photos yourself if you do this method, but again, this is something that you could do right at Walmart. Just bring in your USB drive or CD with the images on it and they will be happy to print 4×6 prints for you.

Baby photography gives you a lot of options for uses of your baby photos. Parents and grandparents all love the photos and love showing them off to friends and family. Prints make great gifts as well. Is it grandma’s birthday coming up? Well just print out half a dozen photos of your baby and you’ll make her day! You might even consider making some sort of collage of the photos and write things about the different events that the photos represent.

Probably the biggest reason to make photos of your baby though is for yourself. You’ll be able to remember what life was like when you had a baby if you take photos of it and document it. If you don’t this special time in your life is going to be lost and it’s not something that can be replaced. You’re going to want to back up your photos as well just to make sure that nothing happens to them. Just make sure you print some though. Holding an actual photograph is probably the most satisfying way to view a photo. Have fun when you’re doing this whole process though, there’s nothing quite like photographing your baby and you can definitely make a great experience out of it and have something precious to show for your hard work.

Some people might wonder whether or not they should use a tripod when photographing babies. Well that’s a very good question and the short answer is yes and no. Actually the correct answer is that it depends on what you are doing.

If the baby is very mobile it is hard to use a tripod because the point of a tripod is to make images steady and sharp. If the baby is always moving around you will be defeating the point of the tripod because you’ll always be picking the tripod up and moving it. You might as well just have to move the camera and not have to worry about a tripod too.

On the other hand, if the baby or babies that you are shooting are fairly stationary, you’ll have a lot of good uses for a tripod. Tripods are meant to provide you with a way to get sharper, crisper photos. You won’t need to worry about the images becoming blurry due to you shaking the camera. In fact the use of a tripod is advised for all types of photography if you are shooting something that is fairly still. It just eliminates a lot of camera blurring issues that you might have.

One great thing about using a tripod is that you will have your hands free to play with the baby, or hold toys as necessary. You’ll need to use a remote shutter release tool with your camera. This is a great way to remove the camera from the equation and make the whole experience a little more natural for everyone involved in the process. Part of creating photographs is to make them look natural and it’s a lot easier on everyone if the camera isn’t always right there in the front, between you and your subjects.

As I’ve already mentioned though, if you’re shooting babies or slightly older toddlers that are going to be moving around, your baby photography is going to be a lot easier if you’re not using a tripod. Why would you want to carry around a long heavy metal thing with the camera when all you really need to carry is the camera itself? You’ll find that you’ll miss a lot of shots because of the cumbersome tripod.

In the end you’re just going to need to use your own good judgment on whether or not you should be using a tripod. I typically don’t use one because I find that I have more control if I have the camera in my hand. I definitely know that there is a place for a tripod however, and that cannot be overlooked.