Everyone, meet Iris!
This is a personal favorite from my latest newborn session. Not typical of what you might see from a newborn portrait session (don’t worry, those are coming), but it stands out to me as more typical the kind of photo I shoot when I’m doing personal work.
I met Iris and her mother at their home in Greensboro, NC. It was a cloudy morning, but the diffused light spilling from the windows really set the mood perfectly. Iris was in a great mood and opening her eyes a lot, she was very curious about my camera I think.
During my time with these ladies I shot a couple rolls of film, mostly portraits of course - but this shot was more of something that just happened at the right time. Iris’ expression, waiting on the changing table for mom - and mom, walking right into the frame to tend to Iris…something about it really captures that moment for me. Moments like this, I feel, are the moments that you can look back on as a parent and genuinely treasure.
Meeting new babies is pretty awesome and being trusted to photograph them is an honor. I think the joy for photographing babies began for me when my son, Miles, was born. At the time I was in school working on my Photography degree and had access to pretty much anything darkroom-related you could imagine (man I miss those days!). I had fallen in love with my son, and fallen in love with film.
I took on a project for his first year of life, shooting one roll worth of photographs of him every day.
The project itself was really a lot of fun, and a lot of hard work. I was surprised at how much I learned about shooting little people under mostly challenging lighting conditions. But more surprising was how much these photos came to mean to me.
Having the first moments/days/weeks/months of your children’s lives on film is just invaluable. When you are home with your little one every day, changes can go un-noticed. One day just sort of gradually works it’s way into the next and, before you know it, your “baby” isn’t a baby anymore.
Shot with a Nikon F100 and 50mm f/1.4 lens on Fuji Neopan 400 film developed at TheDarkroom.
