Taking Advantage of Opportunity

As a photojournalist, you often come across very redundant or familiar situations. It is quite simple to take the easy way out, and come away with the same photo every time, just settling for the safe shot that you know will run in the paper and satisfy everyone involved. These situations could be an annual event that has been covered since the existence of your publication, or in the case of the photos in this post, something very topically similar that was and has always happened a month apart.

The Christmas and New Year's Baby assignments are all too simple. Get a call to show up at a maternity ward, go in, pose the parent or parents up on the bed with the newborn, take a few frames, and leave. You leave with a photo showing the family and the new baby; you just did your job as a photographer and in the process got through a fairly quick assignment on a holiday.

Going into these assignments I knew I was going to be the shooter on both days, so I wanted something different from each situation, something nice that I would be pleased with. I decided to forego the obvious and simple photo, and take advantage of the opportunity that I had been presented with. It is not often that you get to witness parents' first interactions with their child. It is one of life's moments of pure joy and excitement, and you are allowed to be there to record it. You are not there to intrude on a moment but to experience and celebrate it with the family.

When I showed up on Christmas morning, it was my first brand newborn baby photo experience. The parents were glowing. I chatted with them for a while before removing my camera from the bag. They were new parents, with their first child. I watched how they explored and interacted with their new son, and decided it was too beautiful to pass up. Instead of having them pose, (at first, because I did also take the posed shot incase no one liked my different take on the newborn assignment) I just snapped photos of them experiencing their child.

By taking time and advantage of the situation I was in, I walked away with a touching little moment that couldn't really be recreated or experienced again:

I am not saying that you can't get a nice moment or emotion by taking a portrait shot either though: 

With that experience under my belt, I approached the New Year's Baby with a different attitude. I knew that I would be able to capture nice moments AND that my trying something different was appreciated. A risk worth taking once is worth taking again; as I walked into the over-sized maternity room I was trying to figure out how to be different from my thinking outside of the box just a month ago.

The situation was different; there was not a pair of glowing parents, no father doting over his first-born (nor would there ever be), it was a second-born child, with grandma and a tired, but happy mother. It was also dark. A far cry from the very nice side lighting that I was getting from the window on Christmas. I still took the time to chat with the family, Grandma making more of an effort to hold a conversation. The baby was not as active as the Christmas baby, and mom was very tired, but still curious. A lot of my photos became about mom exploring her new child.

Completely satisfied with what I had taken I got up to leave; I noticed that the dark room created a nice contrast with the light over the hospital bed making kind of an ephemeral glow to the room. Now not wanting to focus solely on tight detail shots, I felt that the mood of the lighting matched the situation perfectly. It was just mom and baby and the rest of the world didn't matter at that point. Changing the angle of my shooting to make the best of the contrasting light gave me a very telling image. (Which is sadly appearing over-exposed through blogger, I think blogger brightens posted pics for the web or something. Try to imagine darker edges.) I also really like the body language and that everyone is in adoration of this small, sleeping child. I did not take a safe portrait in this situation because I did not think that it did justice to the story.  

The moral of this blog post is: do not be afraid to spend a little extra time and go out of your way to make a nice photo of something that you have to shoot all of the time. Not every situation or day allows you to do this, but taking the moment to enjoy and experience humanity always pays off in the end.