Some sessions don't fit neatly into a category, and this one from the weekend is a good example.
The booking came through as a gift. A family member contacted me to buy a gift voucher for a young couple who hadn't been able to afford newborn photos when their little boy first arrived. Life was busy, money was tight, and it just wasn't something they could prioritise at the time. By the time the voucher landed and we got a date in the diary, he was six weeks old.
Six weeks is a strange in-between age for photography. He's well past the curled up, sleep-through-anything newborn stage, but he's not yet a bright eyed, giggling three month old either. So this wasn't a newborn session in the traditional sense. It became something else, a studio family session that captured exactly who he was at that moment.
And who he was, was awake. Alert. A little bit cheeky already, if you can believe that at six weeks old. He watched everything happening around him with this steady, curious look that told me he was going to be a handful in the best possible way. We did manage to grab a few sneaky sleeping shots in between, the kind you'd expect from a newborn session, but most of the session was spent working with a baby who was very much present and very much himself.
That's actually what made it special. There's a version of this story where the family missed their window and that was that. Instead, they got images of their son as he actually was at six weeks, personality and all, rather than the more universal sleepy newborn curl that every baby looks similar in.
If you've got a baby who's past the two week newborn mark and you're wondering whether it's too late for studio photos, it isn't. It's just a different session. Alert eyes, real expressions, the beginnings of who they're going to be. That's worth capturing too.
