Meg Faehl Photography

I’ve had a bunch of newborn posts on here lately (with more to come), and one question I get a lot is when should newborn photos be taken. The easy answer to that is sometime within the first 2 weeks after their born. The real answer is it depends. Babies change fast. Really fast. And if what you’re looking to capture is your sweet, sleepy, sometimes dry-skin, still-yellowed-from-jaundice, brand newborn baby then the answer is absolutely within the first 2 weeks. 

But while I’ve always been told by other photographers that you “have” to photograph newborns within the first 2 weeks, because after that it becomes way too hard to get the newborn poses I only partly agree. The truth is a 5 or 6 week old baby is going to be awake for more or their session than a brand newborn. But the good news is that while their awake they’re eyes are a little more focused, and they’re a lot more alert than a teeny-tiny one. And the even better news is that at 5 or 6 weeks they still sleep soundly enough to get some of those snuggly sweet newborn poses. The bad news is that babies change fast, and by 5 or 6 weeks, they might show less, or even very little resemblance to the teeny tiny infant that you held in your arms for the first time just a few weeks earlier.

So there you go- the photographer in me says that babies change so fast that you clearly should schedule a session every week for at least the first year of life :-). But since that’s generally unrealistic then it really depends on what kind of pictures you’re looking for. If all you want is the sweet, snuggly, quintessential newborn pictures then stick with the before 2 weeks rule- because its as close to a guarantee as can be given when working with infants, that those are the images you’ll leave with. But on the other hand, I’ve had some people point out that you will likely have more pictures of your little one in the first few moments, or days after birth than you probably will in the rest of his or her life combined. And maybe that’s enough incentive to wait a few weeks, until your little one starts to have a little more expression, and a little more personality, and really aim for the best of both worlds.

But the warning I’ll leave you with is that whatever timeframe you prefer- don’t wait too long. Because in just a few short months they’ll change so fast. And as the little cutie  pictured above is happy to demonstrate, by 3 months, they’re all baby, and there’s not much left to remind you of the newborn they once were. Except pictures.