After welcoming our first child—and capturing far too many images of him since he was born—we find ourselves in a bit of a quandary: how do we find the time to choose the best ones and edit them?

Let’s begin with a bit of an experiment, shall we. Dig out an old photo album from your childhood, blow off the dust, and flip through a few of the pages. Feel free to reminisce over the collection of faded sepia-tinged images, and bask in those warm fuzzy feelings of nostalgia for a while. We won’t disturb you, we promise.

Okay, all done?

If you’re like us, your eye would probably land on a particularly memorable image; of moments that meant something special to us, or perhaps a photo of ourselves that was just plain funny we couldn’t help but smile. Your next thought would probably be that some of those photos really didn’t belong there in the first place. Is that somebody’s out-of-focus hand? Whose hair was that?! Why am I wearing a dress??? And this was back in the days of film cameras that captured a maximum of 36 exposures per roll, mind you.

Digital photography has elevated the number of images each and every one of us can capture into the thousands, all on a single memory card or smartphone. And professional photographers use this technology to their advantage by capturing as many photographs as they can at every session.

A gallery from one of our own sessions. We usually select about 10-15 percent of photographs captured for preview galleries, removing any images that are duplicates, out of focus, or those that feature awkward facial expressions.

Of course, some of those images are going to be nearly identical. We tend to take a burst of shots for a particular pose or setup just to be sure we get the one that’s absolutely perfect. Minor movements, shutter vibrations, and autofocus hiccups can make some shots look better than others. Also, because newborn babies tend to twitch and squirm a lot while posing, even while they’re sleeping, these additional captures come in very useful.

As newborn photographers, we definitely appreciate the ability to capture more and more shots. The more we capture, the greater our chance of getting shots that are closer to perfection; immaculately exposed, framed and focused. However, with great power comes great responsibility (pardon the trope), and capturing an average of 600 RAW images per session does have its drawbacks.

Now, let’s return to our bellyache about taking far too many images of our beloved baby boy than we actually have time to work on. Even as newborn photographers who do this nearly every day, we find ourselves wishing that we could just leave the selecting, adjusting and post processing of our little boy’s photographs to someone else.

The two stages of our editing process—colour adjustments to achieve our own look and feel, as well as finer edits to clean up the image while preserving the details. Newborns can develop peeling skin and acne just before their session (our boy certainly did!), and these little imperfections could mean that we need to work on an image for up to 30 minutes.

As most new parents can attest to, babies are a handful. A joyfulness inducing and utterly adorable handful, sure, but a handful nonetheless. And between feeds, baths, onesie changes, diaper swaps, bedtime lullabies, all that rocking to sleep…well, you get the picture, babies demand a lot of our time and energy. And they deserve to have it. We would rather spend our time with our boy and watch him grow than be hunched over a computer looking over images of him from 6 months ago.

But we knew what we were getting into from the start, so there’s no need to feel sorry for us! (Oh, you weren’t? That’s fine then.) We became newborn photographers a while before we became parents ourselves, and since we started doing this we’ve always sought to provide newborn photography services to best meet the needs of busy parents who want quality images that they could share, print, and treasure for a lifetime.

Firstly, we never release unfinished work. RAW images are named as such because they are just that, raw and unprocessed, so to speak. We capture hundreds of images so our mummies and daddies can always choose their favourites from a preview gallery of about 60 photographs on average. That’s about 10 percent of the images we take at a typical session.

Our intention when editing an image of a newborn baby is to make them look absolutely perfect and yet completely natural. There’s just so much beauty in the details. Colour adjusted using Megan Macdonald Photography’s LR Preset.

Secondly, we don’t release all images we’ve selected because we understand the fact that the photographs WE liked best may not be the ones YOU liked best. So, while we may have our own specific preferences as photographers, we always let our mummies and daddies choose their favourites themselves.

And lastly, all our packages include full-resolution and meticulously post-processed images that are canvas-ready. We don’t resize or compress images unnecessarily since that would make them look just terrible on large canvas prints, not to mention on the high-resolution screens of your new 4K TV or smartphone. Full-resolution images make excellent desktop wallpapers, too. No annoying pixelation anywhere!

So, what we’re really saying is there may be no solution in sight for our current dilemma of having way too many photographs of our baby boy to post process and showcase. And that’s our problem, really. Sorry for the rant. But for the rest of you who are considering booking a newborn photography session for your little bundle of joy, we may have just the solution for you.

Pick a photographer that does all the work for you so you can focus on that new most important person in the world: your baby.

Written by Timothy Fernandez © Copyright 2019 Bows and Ribbons Photography