Brooklyn newborn photo session: How to be OK if your baby won’t stop crying?

When you are researching newborn photographers, you will come across all these cute sleeping babies posed for their Brooklyn newborn photo session. As parents, we want similar photos of our newborn baby for our walls, as an album, to send out to grandparents, make into screensavers, and blast out to our social media pages to show off our amazing baby. But then their Brooklyn newborn photo session day comes around and BAM! – your baby does not want anything to do with it.

Welcome To The Jungle: What Happens If My Newborn Won’t Sleep?

You’re thinking, “Why won’t you stop crying? I’ve literally done everything I can think of, but you’re still not happy. Don’t you know I’m paying good money for this session? That other baby cooperated in her session, why can’t you just go to sleep and let us get some nice photos?!” If this is happening during your session, I want you to stop, breathe and remember one thing: all newborns cry during their Brooklyn newborn photo session. This is a natural, real emotion that all newborns have for most of their first few months of life. It’s not abnormal. There is nothing wrong with your child for doing it. It is nothing to be ashamed of. They aren’t doing it to embarrass you. They may be experiencing any number of these issues:

• Your baby could still be hungry
• They may need a new diaper
• Sometimes they may have a stomach ache and are gassy
• Your newborn might have colic
• They could be over tired and really fighting that sleep

We will try to rule out as many of these as we can during the session. When you stress out about the fact that your baby is crying, that then makes things even worse because he or she knows you’re upset.

Don’t let the crying upset you. Embrace this moment in time. It won’t be long before you forget how her little forehead wrinkled up whenever she screamed, or how his toes would get all stretched out and tense when he was upset. Let us capture these little details. These crying photos can evoke real emotion and demonstrate the love you have for your child as you try to soothe him or her. Your child can look back at these photos once they’re all grown and remember the solace that they found in your arms. These tender moments are just as important, if not more than the sleeping, posed photos.

The point of booking a Brooklyn newborn photo session is to help you preserve the first memories of your child’s life. While posed photos are cute, you’re not going to look back and think, “Remember how cute she was whenever she would lounge around the house in frog-form?” because that didn’t happen. You’ll look back at these photos and remember all the nights you walked your baby around the house or rocked him in a chair and hummed lullabies to try to calm him down. Those times are very stressful, but they also help you form a bond and that’s what makes these photos treasured.

All that being said, if you have your heart set on those peaceful, posed photos, we can always take a break give baby time to relax and try again.

Brooklyn newborn photo session: What to expect

Every awake baby is different, some will stay calm during wrapped poses. I usually begin most Brooklyn newborn photo sessions with baby fully wrapped to help them feel safe and comfortable. This 90% of the time helps them fall asleep so that we can get the parent, sibling and some prop poses done before the next feeding or another round of crying.

Brooklyn newborn photo session: Include close ups and details

Another type of wrap is with feet and arms showing so you can see a little bit more of their tiny bodies, fingers and toes. We can get several looks out of this type of wrapping. They can have eyes open for these and they are so cute. During this part of the Brooklyn newborn photo session, I can get photos of their tiny toes, fingers, their faces, etc.

Put them in an outfit and just let them relax and do some baby led poses in prop or on the posing table. You can hold up their tiny little arms up and let them stare up at the camera. Hold them over your shoulder and let them just stare in content.

Another of my favorite to do at all Brooklyn newborn photo sessions is expressions shots otherwise known as mugshots. These are a parent favorite black and white image. I try to capture as many expressions as possible from them while they stare at the camera or wherever they feel like looking.

As you can see there are so many ways to swing things at a Brooklyn newborn photo session if your baby just isn’t ready for the full sleepy posed part of the session. We will work together throughout the session to get as many sleepy poses as we can while also capturing images even when baby is wide awake. We will just go with the flow! Don’t stress a newborn session is around 2-4hrs but I usually only schedule one newborn session a day so unless you have someplace to be am usually in no rush.

Remember the journey is just as important as the destination. I hope this post inspires you to go ahead and book your newborn session.