newborn PORTRAITS information

Getting the best from your Newborn portraits session

Please read the following information carefully and complete the session details form prior to your session date.

The best newborn portraits depend on baby being as relaxed and sleepy as possible during the session. Ideally, baby will have been awake for a period of time immediately before the session, so is very sleepy when we begin.

If baby arrives at the tail end of a 4hr nap, ready for “wakey time” it will be much more difficult for us to create the super-sleepy newborn portraits we want to take for you!

Important Notes

  • PLEASE COMPLETE THE SESSION DETAILS QUESTIONAIRE WE SENT YOU
  • LATE ARRIVALS WILL LEAD TO A SHORTER SESSION TIME!
  • PLEASE BRING A DUMMY (PACIFIER) WITH YOU
  • PLEASE DRESS BABY IN SOMETHING THAT DOESN’T NEED TO BE PULLED OVER THE HEAD TO REMOVE
  • OUR STUDIO HAS LIMITED SPACE. PLEASE LIMIT VISITORS TO ONLY THOSE NEEDED FOR YOUR SESSION

Before your newborn session

A newborn peacefully sleeps, dressed in a purple outfit adorned with a flowered hat, resting snugly on a matching purple blanket.

We recommend avoiding any spicy foods like chilli & spices, and other foods such as chocolate, caffeine, dairy products, herbal soups or excessive ginger… or basically, anything that may cause gas in babies, leading to an unsettled sleep and portrait session!

Please do be sure to bring a newborn dummy with you…

We won’t use it unless we need to… but even if you don’t usually use them, we strongly recommend bringing one. One time really won’t hurt – but it can mean all the difference between getting a beautiful series of pictures, or a continual struggle if baby isn’t settled!

A dummy can quite literally shave hours off your shoot time, and lead to a far more successful shoot – meaning more pictures for you – than if we need to continually soothe an unsettled baby – so we strongly recommend bringing one with you. 

A bath or sponge bath (refer to advice by your midwife) before coming to us can also help clear any patches of dry, flaky skin so they won’t show up in your portraits.

This can also help stimulate and keep baby awake prior to the session… so he or she is more sleepy when it’s portrait time: a double bonus for great photos!

We’ll be stripping baby down to just a nappy immediately before we fit any of our gorgeous newborn outfits or wraps for your photos… which means we’ll need to undress him or her with as little disturbance as possible.

Please dress baby in something that doesn’t need to be pulled over the head to remove. A button-down onesie is perfect. This will help us begin your session as soon as possible.

If you visit during winter, we completely understand you popping a hat onto baby before setting out… but we do ask that you try to make sure the hat isn’t too snug fitting!

The reason for this is that sometimes a tight-fitting hat can leave marks and lines across baby’s forehead (think about the lines you get on your ankles when you take your socks off) – and these can remain visible for a surprising amount of time!

Not only are these lines unsightly on your newborn portraits, but they can also be very difficult to edit out – so, much better if we can avoid them in the first place. 🙂

We’ve found that bottle-fed babies almost always sleep more soundly compared to breast-fed during a newborn shoot (with formula milk making them the most sleepy of all) so if you’re happy to use formula milk please do bring this along.

If you’re not happy using formula milk, we recommend bringing expressed milk so we’ll know baby is getting a good feed and not just ‘comfort feeding’ on the breast.

If you do need to breastfeed during the newborn shoot, that’s fine but we may find baby doesn’t sleep so deeply, so the poses we can offer may be less varied… but we’ll still work with him or her to get the best photos we can for you.

If your baby is over 2 weeks old, he or she will almost certainly be less sleepy than a baby born just 7 days ago. Consequently, we may need to adapt your newborn session to work around your baby’s comfort and level of ‘sleepiness’.

Because some of our more elaborate poses require a super-sleepy baby and are therefore not possible to achieve with a more wakey baby, your newborn session will likely include more wrapped poses and/or portraits in parents’ arms.

If your baby is sleeping soundly, we may still attempt some more elaborate poses… but it’s important to be aware that older newborns can be much less amenable to being posed in the ‘super-curly’ poses that we can achieve with a super-sleepy week-old newborn.

Rather than upsetting your little one, if he or she is unwilling or unable to be posed in our more ‘challenging’ poses, we will instead create a set of images featuring simpler poses to ensure we can get the most variety for you.

If your baby is over 4 weeks old

If your baby is 4 weeks or older, or if you are concerned about what we can do for you during a newborn portrait session, we are also happy to change your session to a sitter portraits session if you would prefer (please contact us directly if you would like to discuss this).

When shooting newborns, our studio is quite warm – so we recommend wearing light clothing, even in winter. We often wear shorts!

 A newborn shoot lasts between 1 to 3 hours, depending on the package you’ve booked so you’re welcome to bring along your own snacks/drinks if you want to – and a phone, ipad or book.

In order to minimise disruption and distractions, we do not allow customers to take their own pictures during our portrait sessions.

If you’ve booked a newborn session that includes parent portraits, you’ll want your clothing coordinated…

Depending on your preferences, we suggest wearing either nice light colours (cream/tan tones or whites) so we can photograph you on a high-key background… or you can choose a darker theme (we recommend browns, or blacks) if you’d prefer a low-key look to your family portraits.

The most important thing is that each person’s clothing works together. For baby, we’ll use a suitable wrap to ensure he or she is also colour coordinate for these portraits too!

Please avoid bold patterns or large logos on your clothing, which can be distracting to the eye.

In all honesty, the best newborn sessions tend to be those that with as few disturbances as possible. For this reason, we recommend leaving other children with a babysitter during your newborn shoot if at all possible.

A newborn session is a quiet, delicate process taking quite some time to complete (so is really not very exciting for young children) and our aim is always to keep disturbances to a minimum while we photograph your sleeping newborn!

If you particularly wish to include one or two sibling photos in your newborn session, and you’ve chosen a session that incldues this option, a single sibling may be included at the start of your session, meaning one parent can then leave the studio with the child afterwards if necessary.

For parents wanting multiple siblings included in their photo shoot, we recommend booking a separate family portrait session with us at a later date. Unfortunately, including multiple siblings into a single newborn session means the time we have to photograph your newborn becomes much more limited (leading to less newborn portraits for you).

baby photography shoot

WHAT HAPPENS

AFTER YOUR NEWBORN PORTRAITS…

After your portrait session is finished, we’ll need to edit and retouch all the best images from your gallery.

The editing and retouching stage is where we carefully polish and refine each image, and this part of the process takes time—usually at least twice as long as your session!

At busy times, this can take up to 4 weeks, but usually we can have everything ready in around 2 weeks (or even less). We’ll be in touch the moment your images are finished and ready to view.

If you’d like to know more about our editing and retouching process you can read more here.

Enjoy a free viewing and ordering appointment

Once all your images have been fully edited and retouched, we’ll send you a link so you can schedule your complimentary viewing and ordering appointment at the studio.

This allows you to see all your images in detail, and peruse our sample products in person so you can decide which images and products you’d like to buy from us.

There’s no high-pressure sales at all – but we’ll be there to advise if you need any extra help when deciding the best options for any particular images or products.

Once you’ve selected the images and any upgrades you choose, we’ll take care of creating any orders for physical products, and your selected digital images will be uploaded to an online gallery so you can download them directly.

Option to pre-purchase all files

In 2025, a couple lovingly cradles their newborn, swaddled in soft brown fabric. They stand close together against a plain, dark background, cherishing this tender moment.

Download your DIGITAL IMAGES without having to return to the studio!

Following their portrait session, many of our customers already know they want to purchase all the images from their entire gallery.

If this sounds like you, we offer the option to pre-order all digital images from your collection as follows;

£150 All files upgrade

  • ALL finished images from your gallery
  • High-resolution (perfect for printing)
  • Low-res copies (ideal for phones, email, social)
  • Includes 4k high-resolution animated slideshow, set to music
  • Online gallery with direct download
  • No need to return to studio

Because this option includes all finished images in your collection, selecting this option means you won’t have to return to the studio to select individual files. This is the quickest way to get your images, if you don’t need or require a viewing and ordering session.

All our online galleries also include options to buy additional frames, prints, canvas, cards, digital images, and more, if required.

Please note: due to the nature of digital images, we are unable to offer online viewing for images that have not already been pre-purchased.

The Birches
Mill Lane
Copthorne
RH103HW

As you enter Mill Lane, you’ll find horse fields to your right, and our home is the 6th drive on the left. Please park on, or across the drive in front of the gates. Don’t worry about blocking us in – we won’t be going anywhere!

Please note: there is more than one road called Mill Lane in the area – so be sure to use the postcode.

If you’re familiar with What 3 Words, ///stores.crew.quiet will bring you right to the front gates of our home studio.