When to book newborn photos in Connecticut
The honest answer is that you should book before the baby is born, and almost nobody does.
That is not a criticism. In the last weeks of pregnancy you are thinking about the birth, not about the fortnight after it. But the newborn window is genuinely short, and it closes while you are still finding your feet.
The window is the first two weeks
Somewhere between five and fourteen days is where most newborn sessions land.
In that fortnight a baby still curls the way they curled inside you. They sleep deeply and through almost anything. The skin is new, the hands are still folded, and there are sounds they make for about three weeks and then never again.
By four weeks most of that has gone. The curl straightens, the sleep lightens, and you have a different and equally lovely baby who simply does not look like that any more.
Book during pregnancy, around thirty weeks
Here is the part that catches people.
A newborn session cannot be scheduled for a date, because babies do not arrive on dates. What gets booked is a window around your due date, and then we fix the actual day once the baby is here.
That means the arrangement needs to exist before the birth. Around thirty weeks of pregnancy is the right time to sort it. You text me when the baby arrives, and we find a day in the following week or two.
If you are already past that and reading this at thirty-eight weeks, write to me anyway. It is tighter, not impossible.
If the baby is already here
You are not too late, and I want to be clear about this because people apologize to me for it constantly.
If your baby is three weeks old, write to me today and we will find a day this week.
If your baby is three months old, you have missed the curled-up newborn look and you have gained something else: eye contact, a first smile, hands that reach. That is not a consolation prize. It is a different chapter and it is just as worth keeping.
There is no version of this where it is too late to photograph your family. There is only the version where you keep postponing it, and that is the one everybody regrets.
Nothing here is posed
This is where I differ from most newborn photographers, and it is worth knowing before you book.
No beanbags. No props. No baskets. No arranging your baby into shapes.
The poses you have seen online, the ones where a baby appears to be holding their own chin up on tiny hands, are composites. They are built from several frames, with hands supporting the baby in each one, and they take a long time and a lot of handling.
I photograph newborns in their parents' arms, in their own house, in whatever light the room has. Everyone stays comfortable, the baby gets fed and changed as often as they need, and nothing has to be manipulated.
If what you want is the posed look, I am genuinely not the right photographer and I will happily say so on the call rather than after. More about how I work is on the families and newborns page.
Why it happens at your home
Three reasons, and none of them are about convenience for me.
A baby who has not left the house is a settled baby. The first weeks are too short to spend in a car seat.
Your rooms are part of the photograph. The nursery you painted, the window where you feed at four in the morning, the bed where everyone ends up. In ten years that is what you will want back, and a studio backdrop cannot give it to you.
You can stop whenever you need to. Feeding, changing, crying, all of it. We have up to two hours and we use as much of it as the day needs.
Older children are not a problem
Big siblings are the reason a lot of parents postpone, and they should be the reason you book.
The way a two year old looks at a baby sister when he thinks nobody is watching lasts about a month. Bring him. He does not have to sit still, hold the baby, or smile at me. The frames people end up loving are usually the ones where something was happening.
Pets too.
What you need to have ready
Almost nothing, and that is deliberate.
A room with a window. Clean sheets on the bed if we are going to use it. Whatever you would wear on a normal good day, which we will talk about beforehand anyway.
You do not need to tidy the house. I need one window and somewhere to stand, and I have worked in some very small rooms.
What happens next
Before anything is booked we talk on Zoom, for as long as you like. I ask what you are hoping for and who you want in the photographs, you find out how I work and what it costs, and if it feels right we hold a window around your due date.
The whole process is written out on the how it works page, and there are examples of home sessions in the gallery.
One last thing
Almost every mother I talk to says some version of the same sentence about the newborn weeks. I was in survival mode. I barely remember it.
You will not get that fortnight back, and you are not going to photograph it yourself with one hand while holding a baby in the other.
Tell me about your session
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