As part of the series of celebratory portraits of our daughter’s first birthday myself and Lola planned a purple shoot. I had in mind to paint a purple backdrop for photographing little girls in pink. And Lola wanted to craft a purple smocking dress with matching bonnet fit for a baby princess. And of course we wanted to get a milestone portrait of her standing - which she couldn’t actually do when we started planning but thankfully could pull off by the time the shoot rolled around.

Though the concept was very simple, as I mentioned in a previous blog entry, when shooting babies it’s more like rolling the dice than precise planning. We had everything set up and test shots in the can but when it was time for the star to take the stage of course she was not happy with her new headwear and not in the mood to be photographed. It’s always a bit tricky to get young babies to keep their bonnets on. The trick is usually to distract them with food which means that in a lot of the shots she’s holding a rice cracker but we have another trick to get that out of her hand or out of sight before shooting.

Unlike the blessing dress shoot I didn’t have a perfect shot in my head when I started so I just wanted to see what mood she was in what she would do. And in this kind of shoot a lot of the art is in the editing. And there were quite a few surprises, the main one being that my favourite photo turned out to be one of her with her back to the camera. I got plenty of her smiling into the camera, and they were nice, but this photograph has something special about it and shows off not just our standing baby but the beautiful dress and colour scheme with the new hand painted backdrop. As in real life outside the studio, you never know what you’re going to get with babies.