NEWBORN BABY PHOTOGRAPHER LEICESTERSHIRE - SAFETY WORKSHOP

Evening all

Today I thought id share a little bit about myself and some recent training I have had. After having my second child I soon realised how precious time is and how quickly it rushes by! I decided I wanted to be able to create beautiful memories that stand still in time and are able to be looked upon for years to come. With this in mind I decided to go into photography, and specialise in Newborns.

Recently ive been offering a few free newborn sessions to include in my portfolio.  From that moment, I fell in love with this type of photography & desired to set it as my career path! I soon realised that every single newborn was so special and  every session brings you new challenges.  

In the beginning, I lacked enough experience & confidence which was required to become an excellent newborn photographer. Taking shots of those adorable brand new babies is frightening enough,  when you add posing them correctly, calming them in the presence of their parents who are ready to get involved the moment they cry, and making sure your adhere to all the safety aspects I decided to take an extensive newborn course.

I then saw Newborn Baby Posing LTD advertising Jillian Greenhill’s Newborn Photography Workshop, I decided to book onto this course and I haven’t looked back! Jill made a special trip to the UK for this course and has an established business in Abu Dhabi.

The workshop I attended is not simply about how to run the business you dream of, although that is of course, a huge part of its role. The absolutely vital knowledge anyone will need before they can hope to be a successful newborn specialist, is understanding a new baby. From the very start of my course they taught us how to read a baby, how to cater for their needs, how to ensure I communicate effectively with the parents during my relationship with them, and how to ensure that from start to finish, every baby is not only posed well, but is cared for, cared about, and kept safe and comfortable. 

This course focused on one of the main areas of newborn posing....handling, settling and soothing baby, and getting them to go to sleep, and stay asleep. Posing may seem like the main skill to learn, but if you can't get a baby to stay asleep, you wont be able to pose them. I learnt how to handle a baby confidently and safely, and also how handling correctly plays an important role in settling and once settled, how to pose flowing to give posing the greatest chance of success. 

Newborn safety is a huge part of what I was taught, I have seen so many people miss handle babies and leave them to hold themselves up in certain positions – this is a big NO NO! Any shots that require baby to hold themselves up (such as chin in hands and frog pose) are done as a composite – this is where mum/dad/helper are always holding the baby and edited on photoshop after.

In summary, the main things to be gained from our workshops are:

- Preparing parents for the session
- Managing parents expectations
- Setting up and styling for sessions
- How to use colours, themes and set ups
- Camera technique and settings
- Safe posing and pose flowing
- Soothing techniques to keep baby asleep throughout the session
- How to use sleep patterns to obtain the best posing with the deepest sleep
- Posing babies in props and using the beanbag and transitioning from pose to pose
- Post processing

 I learnt so much from this course and could write about it all day long! Please take a look at some images I have taken on the day: