Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending the First Moments Baby Photography Workshop by my friend and amazing baby photographer Minna Burgess. Minna is a brilliant newborn and baby photographer from Queensland. Her work is minimalistc, with lots of emotion and timeless beauty. I’ve long admired the emotional connection she’s able to bring out in the photographs she takes of newborn babies and their families. So… when I had the chance to join her one day workshop in Sydney I jumped at the chance!
FIRST MOMENTS WORKSHOP
First Moments is a technique founded by Jesh De Rox, a photographer from the US. Over the past few years he has become well known for his technique of getting real emotional reactions from his subject, and thereby capturing more emotive images for his clients. Minna was a participant at one of his Beloved Technique workshops in 2015, and took it a step further by merging this with newborn and baby photography. She’s the only photographer in the world (so far!) teaching the First Moments workshop for newborn and baby photographers.
The day lasted for about 8 hours. It was a great small sized workshop of about 6 participants. Smaller workshop numbers are always great as you have a greater opportunity to see the teacher and ask more questions. We started by going through the theory of the First Moments technique – how to illicit genuine emotion from our subjects. After lunch, a beautiful family with a week old newborn boy came to model for us. It was really fantastic to be able to watch Minna in action. I had heard a little about the technique a couple of years ago from others photographer friends of mine, but I was unsure about how I would be able to use it in my own work. Being able to watch the way that Minna interacted with her clients was really refreshing. There is an intangible X factor when it comes to capturing special moments in photography. One of my own struggles was making my new parent clients feel comfortable in front of the camera – over the past 5 years I have learned how to do this, but the next level towards beautiful imagery is to be able to capture real emotion. To me, capturing that real love between parents and their baby, and between parents for each other, is what baby photography is all about.
Minna’s workshop was a fantastic eye-opening experience for me. Since then I have noticed a real improvement in my parent and family photos during my newborn and baby photography sessions. Thank you Minna! Capturing that emotion is what it’s all about!
Here are some of the behind-the-scenes photos from our workshop: