STAPLES has an amazing deal on sd cards – quick suggestion though…don’t buy huge cards. I hear from clients all the time who have a years worth of pictures on their sd cards and something happens and the cards die.

Personally, I don’t use anything larger than 1 gig. I usually have 3 or 4 cards with me at all times but I like to shoot more cards for a couple of reasons:

- If a card gets lost or damaged, I would only lose a small number of photos from my holidays rather than potentially everything.

- By using smaller cards it kind of forces me to save them to my computer right away. Again, better to be safe than sorry.

Here are a few photo tips for this weekend:

- Your kids sleeping. Is there anything more gorgeous than watching your children sleeping? I have so many beautiful shots of the kids sleeping, sleeping together, in bed with us, sleeping on top of us lol!

- You and your husband – Pass the camera over to the kids and let them take a few photos of you guys. One of my favorite photos of Mark and I is one my son took as we were sitting in our boat!

- Your pet – The other child in the family! Get some great shots of the kids walking the dog, playing with the dog or just hanging out. Again, its one of those things we tend to forget to photograph

- Going for a walk – As you can guess, I take my camera everywhere so I am really lucky that I have so many wonderful photos of my family. Whenever we go for walks I try to remember to bring the camera and make a point of getting shots of the kids walking in front of us. Last summer I got a great shot of my daughter walking down the country road with my mom and the dogs. It was later and the sun was just starting to go down so the lighting was amazing. One of my all time favorites!

- a great sunset – if you are near the lake and there is a great sunset, grab your camera and head down to the water.  The light changes really quickly so you will want to shoot alot and try a few different angles.  I took this in 2008 of my husband and son.  The light was dropping quickly so we raced down to the water so I could take some portraits.  This ended up being my favorite and is still hanging up in our home.

- a photo of everyone – May longweekend is a tradition with us. My cousin and his family come to the lake and we get to spend the weekend with them. Tons of people and always lots of fun. Before the weekend wraps up I try to get photos of him and his wife with my kids, his kids, and whoever else happens to show up. Make sure you tell them to look at the camera and smile rather than just take shots from far away where no one is really looking. Everyone gives me a rough time as I go around and quickly shoot photos of each of them but in the end it is worth it and when I start sharing them with everyone a few weeks later, everyone is thrilled!

Hope that helps get you started. Enjoy your weekend everyone and be safe on those Alberta roads!

This workshop will be of interest to parents with infants up to 6 months old.

During this 1-hour session, you will:

- Learn about the sleep stages your baby will go through from birth to age one. Topics include how much sleep your child needs, when to expect naps, bedtime routine and separation anxiety.
- Learn when your baby will be ready to try self soothing.
- Receive advice to prevent bad sleeping habits from forming.
- Have time for your individual questions.

For more information, check out their facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/events/153836238079361/

It was lots of fun yesterday…it took us a little bit of time to get her to go to sleep but in the end she feel asleep just long enough for me to to get a nice variety of portraits for her parents!

At the end of the photo session, her daddy pulled out his hard hat and asked me if we could do a few baby portraits of her inside the hat.  I didn’t think she would let us do it but we lined the hat with a little blanket, put her inside and then let her settle inside until she was nice and relaxed.

LOVE this portrait…now whenever he puts on his hard hat, how can he not help but think of his little girl!  Enjoy!

All 3 of their children have done my BABYS FIRST YEAR PLAN – where we do a portrait session every 4 months.  Baby number 4 will be doing the same!

I thought I would share this portrait because it was my favorite from the maternity photo session and yet it has nothing at all to do with maternity portraits!

From the first few sessions I did with this family, the dad has always asked me to do a couple of portraits of him with his kids.  I LOVE that he remembers to ask and that it is always really unposed portraits…just him and his kids literally hanging out!

I can hardly wait to see how we are going to do this pose with baby number 4 included to lol! Enjoy!

She asked me if I would be willing to do a photo session for her because her baby was not a “newborn”.  I told her that I have 2 types of sessions for newborn babies…NEW ARRIVALS which is a session designed to do newborn portraits of babies between 7 and 12 days old and WELCOME BABY which is a portrait session for babies over 12 days old and up to 4 months old.

She then told me that she had been online looking for a baby photographer here in Edmonton and when she had called a photographer to get information about prices, the photographer told her that her baby was too old to do newborn portraits!  She then told me that the photographer told her she didn’t do any portraits of babies once they were over 2 weeks old because they were no longer newborns.  I had heard this comment before…a couple of years ago I attended a workshop with a well known baby photographer.  Her advice to us was if the babies were over 2 weeks old, not to bother doing the session because it was too much work and the parents probably wouldn’t buy as much.  How crazy is that!

This got me thinking about the whole baby photography movement that has been going on for about 3 years now.  The new style of newborn portraits is all about capturing that brand new baby.  As photographers, we ask the clients to come for their newborn photo session when the baby is between 7 and 12 days old because they are still quite tiny and if we can get them to go to sleep, they usually sleep deep enough that we can pose them in those cute newborn baby poses, naked, with and without hats on, in baskets, etc.

As a photographer, I love the response that these portraits get and yes, once the babies are over 12 days old, I tell clients that we can’t do those types of poses.  This is because once babies hit the 12 day mark, they are not as fetal, they don’t tend to sleep as deeply or as long so posing them can be difficult, especially with the flashes going off every few minutes.  BUT, does that really mean once they hit 12 days old they are no longer a “newborn” and we can’t do portraits of them?  Of course not.

I have to admit, when my children were born the last thing I would have been able to do is do newborn portraits within those first 2 weeks.  With my son, I was completely overwhelmed with being a new parent and with my daughter it was a rough couple of weeks after her arrival.  The really neat thing is that my daughter was about 6 weeks old when I took her “newborn” portraits and those first few portraits were the inspiration and the creation of Little Bums, Fingers and Toes!

And personally…my favorite of the baby portraits sessions I do is my PRECIOUS PARTS session, when the babies are around that 6 month mark.  This session is all about capturing that chubby baby stage and capturing the “parts”…this is a stage we tend to forget as parents because it goes by so quickly!

I have done up a slideshow to show some portraits I have done over the years that are of babies between 2 weeks and 4 months old. Hopefully, this slideshow will show that a baby doesn’t have to be under 2 weeks old to have beautiful portraits done.