Babies can be challenging subjects. They've certainly got the cutes. But they're usually pre-occupied with looking around, eating, spitting up, and/or sleeping. Any photographs you're going to take of a baby will usually have to be worked in between any combination of these four baby activities.

Lighting

I'm a firm believer that the environment you photograph in affects your subjects. So I try to keep a low profile and ensure a calm environment. For me, this means I'm not going to use flash when photographing a baby unless there's no other alternative.

The four photographs in this section were all taken using soft, available light. For the photograph directly above I used window light to illuminate the baby as her mother held her. The use of a long lens (a 70-200mm lens at 145mm) slightly blurred the mother, keeping the attention on the child.

Posing

Babies don't really pose. They can't sit, stand, or even hold their heads up without a little help. If the baby is especially young, you're going to want a helper around to hold the baby  and ensure that the baby is comfortable (their mothers are obviously the best people for this job).

If you're on your own without help (or if you are the mother and photographer simultaneously), make sure the baby is comfortable so that you can snap away for a few minutes without having to do any serious parenting. In these cases, like the photo directly above, you can ignore the eye-level rule and still get great photographs by shooting from directly above or from any similar angle.

Details

Babies don't stay small for very long. That's why capturing the details is so important. For the photograph below, the baby's mother held the baby up to the window light coming into their home. I noticed the baby's tiny hand gripping her mother's pinky and incorporated that detail into the photograph.

Doing the little things will make a big difference in your photographs. For the background of this photograph, we hung up a simple black cloth in the background. So that was our studio: a window and some black cloth. Very simple and easy, yet the photo looks like it was done in a professional studio.

Mom Makes Him Laugh

No one knows a child better than its mother. When I'm photographing a baby the best results always come through when the mother is standing directly over my shoulder, coaxing the baby into doing one of its "tricks."

Shortly after my first nephew was born we started hearing the rumors of his "hanging tongue" giggle. There was no way I could have coaxed it out of him, but his mother did. And we got the shot:

As with most great photographs, there are several things in this image that work to its advantage. First and most important is the baby's expression. Adding to that is the soft lighting of the setting (we shot outside on an overcast day) and the clean background (blurred by a telephoto lens).