When to Take Maternity and Newborn Photos
Maternity + Newborn · Orange County
Two sessions, two windows, and one decision you make while you're still pregnant.
The short version
Maternity photos: 28 to 34 weeks. Newborn photos: the first two weeks, ideally the first ten days. Book them both at the same time, while you're still pregnant. That's the entire answer, and you can close the tab now with my blessing. The rest of this explains why those windows exist, what happens if you miss them, and why the second one is nearly impossible to schedule after the fact.
28 to 34 weeks
Maternity · outside or at home
still anticipation, not a countdown
The first two weeks
Newborn · at your house
ideally the first ten days
Why 28 to 34 weeks
The maternity window
Before about 28 weeks, the bump photographs as ambiguous. Kind and honest people will look at the picture and say lovely things, and a small voice in the back of your head will say "that could just be a large lunch." You have been through a great deal to get that bump. It should read as what it is.
After about 36 weeks the problem flips. You are tired in a way that is difficult to explain to anyone who has not been there, your feet have opinions, and the baby has begun to treat the due date as a rough suggestion. Thirty to thirty-two weeks is the middle of the middle, and it is where most of my maternity sessions land.
There is a craft reason for the window too. A maternity frame is really about shape, and shape shows up in profile. So most of what we do has you turned to the side with the bump framed by your hands, one above and one below. At 30 weeks that silhouette is unmistakable. At 24 weeks it is a rumor.
Maternity sessions do not have to happen outside, either. Plenty of them happen at your house, which is the easier call if there are older kids who are finished with the car by five o'clock. Bring them into as much of it as they want. Same goes for the dog who intends to be in every frame, the cat who intends to be in none, and the goldfish named Gilligan who you will absolutely want me to photograph. I have no rules about this.
A fact you did not ask for
Researchers at Johns Hopkins once tracked 64 pregnant women and found that the ones with the worst heartburn tended to deliver babies with more hair. Small study, and nobody is promising you anything. But if you have been sleeping upright since week 20, there may be a full head of hair in it for you.
Why the first two weeks
The newborn window
Newborn sessions are a much narrower window than most people expect, and the reason is that newborns change faster in two weeks than they will at any other point in their lives. In the first ten days or so they are still curled into the shape they held on the inside. They sleep through most of a session. They tuck.
By three weeks that is largely over. They are awake more, they are straightening out, and baby acne tends to peak somewhere around two to four weeks, which is nobody's fault and also nobody's favorite. None of this makes for a bad session. It makes for a different one, and if the curled-up sleepy version is what you pictured, the calendar is unforgiving about it.
These happen at your house, and the room that wins is whichever one has the best window rather than the one you have been decorating. Usually that is the primary bedroom or the living room. Often it is the nursery. Sometimes it is the kitchen, which surprises people every time and produces some of the better frames of the morning. I'll walk the house when I arrive and we'll pick then.
I also ask to switch off the overhead lights, because indoor bulbs fight window light and lose. You do not need a magazine house. You need one tidy room and a made bed.
Another one
A newborn can focus at roughly 8 to 12 inches, and essentially nothing beyond that. That happens to be about the distance from a baby's face to the face of whoever is holding them. They cannot see the room, the camera, or me. They can see you, which is convenient, because that is what I am photographing.
Daniel Wesley Photographer
At family parties I was always the one at the kitchen table with the women and the kids rather than out by the grill, which turns out to be reasonable training for this.
Newborn sessions are the quietest thing I do. I'll guide you the whole way through so it never feels like you're being watched, and in almost three years I have never once needed anyone to be photogenic on four hours of sleep.
Katie Partner
If he spots good light while I'm driving, we pull over. It does not matter that he only has his phone on him. We pull over.
The part nobody mentions
These are not two decisions. They're one.
Here is the thing about the newborn window: it is the one appointment in your life you cannot make when the time comes. The window opens the day your baby is born, and that is also the exact week you will have the least capacity you have ever had to research anybody, compare anything, or answer an email.
So the newborn session gets booked while you are still pregnant, at the same moment as the maternity one. We pencil it loosely on your due date and then move it once the baby decides, because babies have never once respected a calendar and I have stopped expecting them to.
Which is also why the money is arranged the way it is. Half holds your maternity date, the balance is due the week before that session, and nothing at all is owed once the baby arrives. Whatever else that week contains, it will not contain an invoice from me.
If this isn't your first
Move everything earlier
Second and third pregnancies tend to show sooner, and they often arrive sooner, so the whole timeline slides. If you have done this before, aim your maternity session at 26 to 30 weeks rather than 28 to 34, and treat the due date with even more suspicion than usual.
The other thing that changes is the newborn session itself, because there is now a two year old in the house who has strong feelings about the situation. That is genuinely fine. Older siblings are part of the session, not an interruption to it, and the photos where a toddler is regarding their new sibling with deep skepticism tend to age extremely well.
Samantha from Accounting
Wants it on the record that nothing is owed after the baby comes, and that she considers this extremely generous of me.
What Orange County does to the timing
The local part
Two things about doing this here rather than anywhere else. May Gray and June Gloom are real, and the marine layer burns off somewhere between eleven and never. It makes for beautiful soft light and it makes golden hour a coin toss, so a maternity session in those months wants some flexibility built into it.
And in midsummer the sun does not set until nearly eight, which sounds wonderful right up until you remember that a three year old turns into a different person at seven fifteen. October through December is the easiest stretch of the year here for outdoor light, with the shortest gap between "good light" and "bedtime."
None of that should drive when you conceive, obviously. It just means if your window lands in June, we plan for the marine layer instead of hoping.
Wardrobe gets sorted well before the day, and there's a whole separate piece on it over at what to wear for maternity photos.
Noodles Editor in Chief
Endorses the ten day newborn window on the grounds that it is the only stretch of human life where the subject sleeps as much as he does.
Saving the best for last
During pregnancy, some of the baby's cells cross into the mother and stay there. Not for a few months. For decades. They turn up in the heart, the skin, the liver. Which means that long after these photos are on a wall somewhere, a small physical piece of that person is still walking around inside you. The pictures are not the only thing you keep.
Tell me your due date.
That's all I need to start. We'll work backward and put both dates on the calendar in one go.
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