Newborn Photography Workshop | Private Photography Newborn and Maternity Workshop

I love working with different photographers around the country and helping them build their portfolio while teaching them about lighting and top photography techniques.  However Kelli put me up to the challenge when it came to finding models for this 12 hour private  maternity and newborn photography workshop.  I have access to many models for my workshops, however finding a concentrated amount of pregnant woman and babies a couple days old all on the same day was a challenge!  So I needed to find at least one baby less than 7 days old on the specific day of the workshop because Kelli was driving up from Mississippi for this private photography workshop in Atlanta.  But I don’t like to do things half way. I’m extremely committed to photography AND my students. So we managed to find and coordinate not just one newborn, but but three newborn babies and two pregnant models. At the end of the 12 hours (split into two days) we finished the lesson with some tips of Senior Portraits using Kelli’s daughter as a wonderful model.  Look at a small taste of what we accomplished in 12 hours with six different shoot, so Kelli learned and lot and left with many great images for her portfolio.

I wanted to do some newborn images outdoors in nature.  Found this great horizontal limb and it made a great sleeping area for first newborn shot

Kelli had brought this frame with her so we put it to use.  Found a tree stump with the same tones as the frame and it worked great!

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Below is Baby Jett at only 5 days old, perfect timing for our workshop.  The best newborn pictures happen when the baby is not even 10 days old. After ten days babies begin to stretch out, and as photographers we still want them all curled up! We did all of baby Jett’s images inside the studio with natural window light.  All shots were take with window light, a reflector and a 50mm lens except for the macro shots that was taken with a 55mm macro.

Everyone should have a dinosaur costume for their newborn. That amount of adorable-ness should be illegal!

Alexandra volunteered to be one of our maternity models.  Started out in the studio before we headed to an outdoor location.  Below is a white background with two studio strobes lighting up the background and our model is 10 feet in front of the background to create the silhouette.

Alexandra wanted a baseball theme to one of the image so we got the paint out and created the image below.

Three days before Kelli came into town I went out to Mellow Mushroom for dinner. There a beautiful, very pregnant lady was our waitress. As a photographer, it’s a good idea to be fearless. So I asked our wonderful waitress how she felt about modeling! She told us she was due in just ten days which was awesome! We exchanged information and her and her wonderful husband helped model for Kelli! We shot these next pictures with beautiful back lighting and a reflector.

The yellow fabric looks great against the blue sky, I exposed for the blue sky to get a nice rich blue with hazy June weather.  I set up a studio light with a softbox in front of Laura and create the nice wrap around lighting.  After I got my exposure for the sky, I did not change any camera settings and just adjusted the studio light until I got the light at the right intensity.

Next model is Baby Greer. She was incredible,  sleeping through everything.  I wanted to put her in a beautiful nature setting and used a reflector to bounce the lighting back into the shot.

The bonnet Greer is wearing used to be her mom’s =) Tradition is a sweet and simple thing.

Want to know a secret? Baby Greer posed her hand up there all by herself! Just precious.

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