A baby grows and changes so much during the first year. I have always loved seeing progression pictures of babies as they grow month by month, and knew that I wanted to take monthly baby pictures when my first son Ben was born (in 2017)…but how do you take monthly baby photos? Having done it now for all four of my kids, I’m going to share some tips I picked up along the way of how to take monthly baby pictures.
I thought I knew some basics of how to take monthly baby photos, but as I started taking them month after month, I found out some tips and tricks I wish I would have known at the beginning- like don’t wear red, it reflects and projects a red hue onto your baby’s skin and in the pictures. My husband went to Madison for college and works at a company with a red logo, so just about every T-shirt he owns is red lol. This is a tip we only learned about half a year in.
How to take monthly baby pictures:
- Number one is pretty obvious: you need something to take pictures with – either a phone (I used my iPhone to start, and then switched to a dslr (or I got refurbished mirrorless camera that is amazing).
- Use natural light – turn off all the overhead lights, open the blinds.
- Pick a time of day and do it at that same time of day every month (sunlight color changes throughout the day, sometimes it’s blue, sometimes it’s yellow…and there’s only so much a photo editing program can do. If you want your photos to be semi-the-same lighting wise, I’d suggest picking the same time of day or close to the same. We ended up picking after their morning naps when they were rested and happy)
- Use a backdrop to show change –a blanket or a chair or with stuffed animal, you want a reference point that stays the same as your baby grows, something against which you can see growth and you also want something that shows the months. You can add text to a picture by either the old fashioned way of writing it, or with an editing software (something like canva (canva is free!) where you can add text to pictures) but why mess around with that when you can get cute little blocks or a blanket with months on it?
- Have someone help – grab your partner or a friend or family member. It’s easier to take a photo when you’re not worried about shaking a rattle and getting attention, having someone else there helps – like when they squiggle around and the blanket needs to be straightened. There have certainly been months I have taken the photo by myself…it was just a little bit longer of a process, but it’s definitely doable.
- Grab a rattle or something that makes sound and grabs attention.
- Don’t wear red or bright reflective colors
- Take 10-or even 20 photos, you’ll use 1, and you can easily delete the ones you don’t want.
- Edit it – with a phone you can edit it with the phone editor or an app like Snapseed. With a camera you can edit it in photoshop or some other program like lightroom
- Print it – I like mpix.com
- Have an album – writing in the kids’ monthly album and doing the monthly photos is something we really treasured! We used Lucy Darling baby albums.
Month after month, as I’ve done these monthly baby photos, I cannot tell you how much I look back and love that we did them. At first I thought “is it really worth it to take monthly baby photos?” but as I’ve done them and looked back, I have truly come to love this little tradition of taking the photos. And I have to tell you, looking back through the photos, I definitely tear up!
Do you have any extra tips or questions? Just let me know in the comments below
Leave a Reply