Printing baby portraits with heart

From the tiny fingers and toes of a newborn baby held by a glowing new mother to innocent chubby faces with delicate eyelashes and flawless skin, photographing the earliest days of a child's life is a joyous task for one of Canon Australia's Canon Masters and award-winning fine art portrait photographer, Kelly Brown.

Though she began her photographic career shooting 'anything and everything' from weddings to family portraits, babies have become her main point of focus. As a mother, she understands why these precious, fleeting moments need to be documented for families. "When you have your own baby, you don't want to miss a moment and they grow up so fast," she says.

Kelly has been a photographer for 18 years and has travelled internationally to speak at events and teach newborn posing classes in nearly 20 countries, while raising children of her own. "Now my eldest is almost 19 and I have twins that have just turned 16," she continues. "They're only small for such a short period of time and being able to document their growth and every milestone was really important."

"We live in such a digital world with photographs and videos everywhere. They come and go, literally disappearing within seconds," she says. "I focus on creating something that's tangible and is going to last a lifetime. Something that hangs on a wall is forever present as a reminder of a special time or a person."

Here, Kelly shares her best advice for photographing newborns in a way that captivates the hearts of families and how to translate your work into outstanding large format prints.

For Kelly, when photographing newborns, aside from creating a welcoming environment, it's important to keep in mind soft lighting and use a longer focal length.

"When you have a baby in front of the camera, you've obviously got to create the right environment and make sure that they're well fed, calm, safe and secure," she says. "I welcome them into a space that creates an experience for them, right down to the temperature of the room and the music that we have playing – everything is planned.

"In terms of lighting, you want to create beautiful, big soft light. Whether you're using natural or artificial light, you need to know how to control and direct it, so modifiers are really important. Being able to feather and diffuse your light to make it really soft will definitely have a huge impact on the final result.

"The right lens is also really important. I use the Canon EOS R5 with the Canon RF 28-70mm F2L USM lens, but it's very rare that I will take it off 70mm, purely because it's going to give me the best results in terms of creating beautiful depth of field and not generating any distortion.

"It also allows me to zoom out if I need to for safety reasons when I'm photographing a baby and a prop," Kelly adds. "Being able to shoot with a wide aperture is something I prefer to do because of the beautiful softness it adds to the backgrounds, which helps really make the baby stand out."

Kelly recommends having a very clear idea of how prints will look, even before you shoot the images. "Every time I pick up the camera, I've already got an idea of how it's going to look hanging on the wall," she says. "That obviously can mean putting different photographs together to create one image for safety reasons – for example, if a young baby needs to be supported.

"However, when I am creating a beautiful portrait of someone and there are storytelling aspects to the image in terms of the props I use, or the way it's styled, everything is well thought out in terms of lighting and exposure so that I know exactly what I need to do. Every time I set up a shot, I'm already seeing how it's going to print."

When Kelly begins her editing process, she uses Adobe Photoshop* to perfect her work, usually delivering around 20 images per gallery for her clients. Editing is kept to a minimum – around five minutes per image.

"I use Photoshop to polish my images and enhance a lot of the details that are captured, but I would say 75% of the image is created in-camera, so I'm not relying on using it to fix photos," she explains.

"First of all, I'll go through the background of the image and remove anything that's distracting, such as little creases or fluff that might be on the backdrop. Then I'll start working on anywhere I might need to darken or lighten any areas. Once I've done that, I might add a little bit of contrast, any skin softening, then any colour enhancements. I then sharpen and close the image.

"Photos can take a little bit longer if I've had to do any composite images, but we try to keep them as natural as possible and not overdo it.

"When sending images to print, I'm printing in Adobe RGB and use the paper profiles so that I can make sure that everything's going to work best for that particular paper choice. I edit on a self-calibrating monitor so that what I see on screen is definitely what I'm going to see when I send it off to print."

The eyes and lashes of a newborn baby are the main focus of many of Kelly's images and she says finer details and facial features such as this really matter when making prints.

"We're trying to focus on the eyes of the baby every time, even though they're sleeping," she says. "When I'm shooting with my Canon EOS R5 and my Canon RF 28-70mm F2L USM lens, I know that those eyelashes are going to be crystal clear and sharp with phenomenal detail.

"When I bring that image up on my calibrated monitor, I know that every print I produce is going to have those details and that comes down to the printer that I use as well," Kelly continues. "Working with the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-4000 with Canon ink allows me to produce a really high-quality print. It hasn't skipped a beat in the last few years and I've been very lucky to win a number of awards using that printer. But it also comes down to paper choice."

Kelly keeps her offerings simple because, in her experience, clients "can be overwhelmed with too many options, need to be guided and want the process to be simple". She often produces archival matte prints in keepsake boxes for families, but also creates large format prints for walls, as both the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-4100 and Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-4000 allow fast 44-inch output.

"I can hand-feed A3 sheets so easily with my printer," she says, "and I'm able to print larger wall art for my clients often while they wait. They get a beautiful slideshow on a large TV screen to watch but I often invite them to view their large print coming off the printer too. I've seen quite a few tears as they watch photographs come to life in front of them. They love the process and get to see what goes into creating a print like that."

The value of printed images is an extra piece of magic that a photographer can bring to families and something Kelly feels is really important to maintain. "Photographers today have lost a little bit of that value in terms of what we have the ability to produce. If we can share more of that and show people what we can create, then they're more aware of it," she says.

"I've been printing my own work for more than 10 years and people just expect it now. Even when I'm teaching and I have models come in that aren't clients, I still give them prints because of how much I value those photographs. I get tears, I get gifts, I get things sent to me in the mail because of what I'm producing for them."