Basket Baby Photos

More photos of my precious newborn daughter Tessa! I can’t help myself. She is soooo flawless. She’s become my muse. I will strive – for the rest of my life – to capture the beauty and perfection of this tiny creature.

I don’t have many studio-esque props for photos, having just moved from California to Florida with a tiny 5×8 uHaul of my essentials, so I ended up scrounging up some of my shawls and the basket that I use to hold my cat toys and treats to use as the naked baby backdrop props. I’m kind of a photographic MacGyver like that. The really cool part is that one of the shawls (the beaded brown one) is the shawl that I wore for my first maternity photo session. See?

So anyway, I stuffed the shawls into the cat toy basket, laid a black sheet down on my living room floor by the balcony windows to use the natural light outside, and just started snapping pictures of a sleeping Tessa. I am finding that it is IMPOSSIBLE to “pose” a baby. You just kind of get them comfy then work around whatever THEY feel like doing. And now, having to maneuver and placate my own little child, I feel awful for making unrealistic demands of the families I’ve shot photo sessions for in the past. “Can you get your baby to look this way?””See if you can get him to look at the camera.” “Could you have her straighten her legs out a bit?” HA. HA. HA.

Seriously. Babies are the ultimate divas. They do what they want and you pretty much have to take it. Anyway, I snapped these photos within about 10 to maaaaybe 15 minutes, since I didn’t want to overwhelm my little princess. Tessa seemed blissfully unaware that I was assaulting her with my lens, but I didn’t want to leave her lying naked in a basket for too long. So the pictures are a bit redundant in nature, but I love them soooo much.

So here’s my basket baby photos, taken when Tessa was five days old. Isn’t she the most amazing miniature human EVER?!