Like the day you were born // Baraboo newborn photographer

A little over a year ago I stopped photographing newborns at my place and started visiting their homes.

It began with a client who had had a difficult delivery, and wasn’t feeling up to venturing out, so I offered to come to her. She got to sit with her feet up, in the comfort of her own home, admiring her pretty little baby while I worked, and I got to find a little patch of window light and capture that baby in the place he’d come to know as home, surrounded by the things that were most meaningful to his family.

No imposed props. No fake backdrops. No hot bright lights. Just a baby in his home, with his family.

Sometimes I work with first-time mamas who are worried about their babies’ “flaws” — a downy back, peeling skin on their feet, the umbilical cord that hasn’t fallen off yet. And sometimes they ask if I can make those things disappear when I’m editing the images — a sure sign they’ve been looking at highly-Photoshopped babies somewhere online.

As a mother of three, none of them babies anymore, I want to plead with them to  not only let those details be, but to let me document them. Because you will want to remember those little things, because they represent the final ties he had to being part of you.

The downy hair and peeling skin that protected his delicate self all those months. The cord that nourished him and connected him to you. Someday you’ll hold someone else’s newborn baby and run your fingertip along that child’s feathery details, and it will remind you of when your own baby was that tiny and new. And how perfect he was, just the way he was when he was born.