Newborn Baby Photography - Training for Beginners

LIGHTING

Many newborn photographers favour natural light but here in the UK we are seeing more and more turn to studio light. If you live in a sunny climate with many long hours of daylight, natural light photography soft and beautiful. However here in England daylight is short especially in winter and can limit your shooting time drastically.

After seeing how easy it is to achieve soft and natural skin tones consistently using studio light we were converted.

There are many different types of flash you can buy. Just remember that the larger the light source, relative to the subject, the softer the light will be and with newborn photography we are looking for soft lighting.

You need to use as large a softbox as you can in the space that you will be shooting in. We have our softbox placed a 45 degree to the newborn and ensure that it is the light from the bottom of the softbox that skims across the baby’s head to create feathered soft lighting.

We use a 135mm Rotalux Softbox with an Elinchrom D-Lite One studio flash head with an Elinchrom Skyport trigger which is placed on the hotshoe of our camera. When you press the shutter on your camera the Elinchrom Skyport will trigger your studio flash.

The Elinchrom D-Lite One is a low powered studio flash. We need a low powered unit because we want to shoot at a wide aperture to create a shallow depth of field. Our backdrops will be softly out of focus creating that dreamy image.

We have our D-Lite One set to 0.1 on the flash head. We use a DLSR full frame camera and shoot at 100 ISO, 125 shutter speed with an aperture of 3.2. We use a 50mm prime lens for shooting on the beanbag and a 35mm wide angle lens when shooting overhead on prop and flokati rug shots.

If you are unfamiliar with the above photography terms we recommend you visit this link which will explain them to you.

https://photographylife.com/iso-shutter-speed-and-aperture-for-beginners

If you are a natural light photographer make sure you avoid south facing windows as the light on a sunny day will be way too harsh. If you can chose a room that is north facing. If you can’t get away from a south facing window move your baby as far away from the window as possible and add blinds or something to diffuse the light coming in from the window such as a white muslin cloth. If it is a dark day you may need to increase your ISO to make the image brighter.

This lecture explains how to set up your newborn photography studio ready for your first newborn photography shoot.

We will talk you through the props and accessories that you will require to ensure you have all the tools necessary to create beautiful newborn images.

A brief description on Parents arrival to the studio

First pose - the flokati pose

Transitioning from the flokati pose onto the first beanbag pose.