Time to meet beautiful newborn baby Hailey

A little background on this session.  I was the photographer at Sarah and Ryan’s wedding in 2015 (which you can see at this link), and since then they had their first baby, daughter Violet, in the summer of 2018.  I was not able to do newborn photos for Violet, but we did have a great one-year old photo session last summer.  Sarah got in touch with me sometime in January to tell me that they were due for baby #2 in the spring, and to warn me that they would be in touch for newborn photos once the baby arrived.

Baby Hailey made her appearance in early April, shortly after the beginning of major restrictions on business due to COVID.  But babies are not going to delay their arrival because of government restrictions, and once here those babies are going to grow very quickly!  So to get those critical newborn photos we decided that we were going to ignore the restrictions and go ahead and have the photo session.

When I arrived for the session Hailey was wide awake and wanting to be fed, so while Sarah took care of Hailey I thought it would be fun to get some more photos of Violet.  Grandparents Sharon and Dan happened to also be at the house, so I got some shots of Violet as she played with Grandma and Grandpa, one of which starts the photos below.

Once Hailey was fed and changed, we started on the photos.  But Hailey threw us a bit of a curve!  Her schedule up until now had been that after being fed in the morning she would then nap for a couple of hours.  The problem is, when working with a newborn their schedule is all so new that it can completely change at a moments notice.  And sure enough, Hailey picked this day to skip her morning nap and instead be wide awake and very wiggly.  Which completely changed a lot of the photos that we had planned! 😀

There is a big difference between photographing a sleeping baby and a wide awake and active baby.  Those little arms manage to get in the way at the worst possible times!  Sarah was sure that Hailey would crash out soon, but we decided that we might as well start taking pictures and see how she did while awake.  Fortunately Hailey was just fed and changed so even though she was awake she was not at all fussy.

We spent the next 90 minutes or so taking all kinds of photos of Hailey by herself, with her sister, with her parents, and in as many different combinations with her family as we could come up with.  Hailey stayed awake the entire time.

Some of my favorite shots from the session were of Hailey and Violet together.  Violet is obviously quite excited about her new role as “big sister”, but at age two she is also clearly unsure of just how she is supposed to interact with this newcomer to the house.  It is going to be fun to watch them at our next photo session to see how this relationship develops.