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We had the absolute pleasure of photographing little baby Reagan in our studio this week. Reagan is only a few weeks old and I'm sure you'll all agree she's a little cutie!

Reagan's mum - actually it's "mom" because she is from the states Candice was very well prepared for the shoot and came along with the most beautiful little headband and hat that she had been sent from a photographer friend in the US.

Newborn and baby photography in the US is big business and I have to say we are very influenced by the best of them. When it comes to using props such as crochet hats and baskets, cocoons, even slings like the stalk may bring the US photographers are streets ahead of us over here in the UK. In fact it's rather diffult to source good props over here in our experience - for our baby hats we have had the pattens sent from the US and had one of our grannies make them for us!

We hope that we can make a difference to how babies are photographed over here. We have changed the way we shoot newborn sessions so that they take a lot longer (usually around 2 - 3 hours) and during the shoot the baby will be awake, sleep and generally very chilled out. The whole experience is designed to be minimum of stress and maximum of pleasure for the parents. We hope that Candice and Dad Jake found this to be the case for little Reagan's photo session.

So - on with the pictures! The three we've selected here are three of our favourites but the whole shoot can be viewed on the slideshow.

Apologies if any You Tube ads come up along the bottom of the show - just click them away if they do!

We wish Candice, Jake and Reagan well and look forward to welcoming them all back to our studio for more photos as the family grows!

Inspired by my all time favourite baby photographer from the US, here's a few recent pictures of our latest craze - "Babies In Hats".

I've been so looking forward to sharing these pictures from Fountains Abbey. We had a really nice time shooting them with Amy and her family. It was a glorious hot day and as it was half term we took our new grand daughter - who was only 10 weeks old along with her mum and Uncle/my son together with a picnic. We sent Andy on ahead of us to meet up with Amy as it was so hot and we followed to arrive roughly at the time we expected him to have finished with Amy.









It was a great afternoon except for the fact that we had another shoot booked in after Amys (Amy was booked at 1pm with the second shoot being booked at 3pm). Unfortunately the second shoot family didn't turn up. So we walked around the grounds of the Abbey looking for them for an hour in the seering heat, thinking we had missed them and then went to get everyone ice creams to cool off before finally giving it up as a bad job at 4.30pm.

All of the money donated in lieu of the shoots has gone directly to Candlelighters. When the book is printed we will have paid for all the design work, layout and production costs of the book - so the more pages that have been purchased the more money this has cost us to do.

When people don't show or cancel a shoot at the eleventh hour it is not only Candlelighters that lose out on the lost donation but in real terms it actually costs us quite a lot. Our time to us is money. The chances are that another family would have wanted that appointment slot - we are very busy with appointments and half term weeks are always premium booking times. We have things to do all the time and sometimes work silly hours just to keep on top of the workload so to give the time freely and then have something like this happen is a double whammy.

We have learnt one or two hard lessons along the way with this project and although it's with regret we will not be running any similar projects in the forseeable future. Charity, as they say, really does begin at home.

Well we've finally done our last ever shoot for the Candlelighters book project. It was last Wednesday at the beautiful Fountains Abbey, near Ripon. I will be blogging some pictures from that shoot as soon as the family concerned have viewed them.

We're just finalising where to get the book from since it will be much smaller than we had originally anticipated and had quotes for. As soon as we know more we will be contacted the families who joined us in our efforts to raise money for Candlelighters with details of how to order the book. I will also be blogging on here details of the book once we know more.

Meanwhile here are some of Andy's favourite pictures from a recent shoot at Knaresborough Castle:

....we get more bookings! The phone rang....the voice on the other end said "You have just taken some pictures of my friend and her family and I'd like to book in too...." We love it when this happens (obviously!) because these are the best bookings to have. Not only have the come from a personal recommendation but it means that the person coming for the portraits already know what our style is like and they like it. In this instance Karen and her family are friends with Mandy in the previous post.