Why I Love Lifestyle Photography
Candid photography is raw. It is uncut moments in time. It is a person getting on the bus. It is a split second where someone is doing something in their natural environment and not posing for a camera. It is not perfect photographs featuring perfect posing and lighting.
Lifestyle photography combines that candid photojournalism with perfect posing and lighting to creates a more modern style. Photographers who specialize in lifestyle photography create images of people doing things they would normally do in a natural setting.
This is my preferred style of photography and let me tell you why.
Newborn lifestyle photography is about documenting the life of a brand new little person. It is about capturing the personality of each baby and celebrating their uniqueness. It is about the feelings between two parents as they realize the future years of their life have been forever changed for the better.
And through newborn lifestyle photography, I get to immerse myself in their life even for just a couple hours and enjoy and capture the love that is naturally surrounding them.
In order to capture these feelings, an environment needs to be created that facilitates connection. Lifestyle photographers often need to be able to photograph their subjects as if there is no camera in the room. It takes time for parents to feel completely comfortable, so these sessions can never be rushed. With newborns, I always follow their cues, their position likes and dislikes, and if they should move their arm, stretch out those tiny feet, give me a great big yawn, I photograph it. Those moments are just as, if not more important. Being able to capture the personality of a newborn baby in images is something new parents are sure to treasure completely.
Every life is so valuable, so beautiful, so precious. There are ways that a baby will just yawn or in how a mom will rock her little girl against her chest, that is beautiful. There are stories and narratives we can tell through capturing these moments that people can keep forever. In a glimpse of these first few months of their life, we get to capture their innocence, their story, their personality, just how very loved they are. We get to capture it not in a rigid way, but them as they are in their element.
Lifestyle newborn photography takes the planning and preparation of newborn studio portrait sessions and combines it with the raw, uncut moments of newborn photo-journalistic photography. The result is a brand new form of art. One that leaves parents breathless. One that leaves a lasting memory, of that perfect little babe and the feelings of love that surround them.
