How to Document Your Baby’s First Year With a Photo Book
Becoming a new parent is full of trials and tribulations, that’s no secret! As soon as your baby is born, your life morphs into something different, with newfound responsibility, challenges, and sleepless nights – but plenty of special moments that make it all worth it!
Photographing these special moments can be a little tricky, of course. As a new mother or father, your focus is on keeping your baby safe and making sure their first year in the world goes smoothly, which often leads to experiencing these special moments but failing to document them.
This is a bit of a shame. Photographing the big moments and uploading them to a photo book maker is all about preserving memories and ensuring that you – and your child – can look back at those first few milestones.
But you don’t need to have your smartphone at the ready every second of that first year, just the seconds that you know are going to be important. With this in mind, we’ve concocted a list of all the moments during your baby’s first year that you should take a second to photograph, ensuring every special memory is immortalised in print and color.
The Fresh 48
Known in the photography world as the ‘Fresh 48’ these are the first two days of your baby’s life, when they’re growing accustomed to the world around them for the very first time. Whether these are taken in the hospital, the birthing center, or at home, capturing your baby’s first couple of days properly is an absolute must for preservation.
Professional Help
And when we say properly, we mean professionally. Lots of parents take pictures during those initial few days, but the best ones are those that take a few minutes, consider the lighting, the framing, and the scene itself. This can be a little tricky when your mind is – obviously! – elsewhere, but you can always get a professional photographer to help you, even if it’s not necessarily in those first 48 hours. When you come to look back at them in your photo book, there’s zero chance you’ll think of it as money badly spent!
That First Big Stretch
Perhaps the most quintessential cute newborn moment is when they awake from a long nap, lift their arms, stretch, and give out a long sleepy yawn. But their swaddle-stretch days are limited, normally occurring during the first couple of months of their life, so it’s important to capture it at least once. Just don’t wake them up to capture it. You know better than anyone that they won’t thank you for that!
The First Smile
Nothing is as special as when your baby smiles for the first time. Their eyes sparkling, their grins gummy and playful – it’s a moment that will live in your memory forever, but it won’t live in theirs.
For this reason, we think it’s a good idea to keep your smartphone handy and make sure you capture your beaming baby as soon as it happens. If you want to be really thorough, we would also recommend noting down the date and the reason your baby smiled, posting it on your Instagram or Facebook to eventually bind up in a photo book.
Foodie Photos
From the cutest moment to the messiest moment, there’s nothing quite like watching your baby take their first taste of real food. A lot of the time, it’s an absolute disaster, with most of the food going everywhere but their mouth, but despite the lengthy clean-up process, it’s hard not to smile at their first attempt. And it makes sense to capture it, not just from a memory-treasuring perspective, but to document what they tried and how it worked out as they embark on their solids journey.
Their First Tooth
Sticking with food, your baby is going to find the process a whole lot easier when their first teeth start to come through. As soon as you notice this, it’s a good idea to take out the camera and capture it – because as soon as that first pearly white appears, the rest will follow suit very quickly.
Mommy and Daddy
The last thing we’d recommend is to capture photographs with you and your baby – not just your baby. It might sound a little simple, but due to ease, many parents take first-year photographs of just their baby, without them in the frame.
But outside of professional photographs, it’s important to occasionally ask your partner to take hold of the camera and snap a few candid pictures of you and the baby together – and vice versa. When your baby is a big kid, they might not want to get so close and cuddly anymore, so it’s a good idea to photograph it now while you still can!
