What's private, and what's public? Up to you!
If you consent to images from your birth being shared on social media and/or my website, how we go about selecting your images is completely up to you - you are in control of what gets shared and what doesn't, as well as how involved you want to be in selecting the images that get posted. Some birth clients are more involved in this selection process than others, and were happy to put the time and energy into giving feedback about every single image (see below). If you just don't have the emotional energy to fuss over that kind of detail, and you trust me to select images that aren't graphic or unflattering, you're certainly welcome to just give me a little guidance about what you prefer. Often, moms are content giving general guidelines: they don't want graphic photos of them or their baby's genitals, or they don't want baby's face in the images, or they don't want images from when they were laboring naked in the tub, etc. and beyond that, they may leave it up to me what I post.
A common question I get about image selection is whether or not I would share images of their baby crowning or their genitals - while they're interested in capturing it all, they don't want to share it all, aside from maybe a nipple visible during baby's first latch. Generally our preferences tend to align pretty well. I doubt I'll ever share a graphic photo of baby crowning on my social media, but moms are certainly welcome to post it on theirs, and they're welcome to tag me if they'd like! We will have a consultation where we show a variety of real birth images, so you can show me exactly what you like and don't like, and describe in detail exactly what you're comfortable with, where you want me to stand as baby is crowning, etc.
After you've received your album, it's okay to wait a few days or weeks before looking through it and discussing the images you're comfortable authorizing me to share on social media or my website. You're taking care of a brand new baby, your sleep schedule is total chaos, you may also be getting the hang of breastfeeding and dealing with tongue ties and latch issues, you could also have older siblings to wrangle while the baby sleeps, and boy do I remember that it's a struggle just to eat a hot meal sometimes! Please know you never need to apologize about a delayed response. Your text message inbox should not be a high priority in the first few weeks postpartum, so don't feel bad if a few texts get missed. Some moms already know they want to keep things pretty private for the first 3-6 weeks before announcing that baby is here, while others are eager to post ASAP. Some moms authorize me sharing the photos without tagging them, as it's fairly unlikely that we'll have significant overlap in our audiences, and they make their own announcements later.
Compiling Social Media Options
Katie and her husband Rett wanted birth photography, but are fairly private about what they share online. Katie's doula and midwife both are fairly active on Instagram, and Katie was interested in allowing them to share photos of them providing care to her, but she didn't really want to approve sharing a lot of images with her own face in them. We decided that we'd plan on her and her husband authorizing every image before anything would be shared online, and making separate folders for our use.
We worked together to make separate lists of what I was authorized to share on my website and social media, as well as a more limited list of images that her doula and midwife were authorized to share. Some images were cropped in tighter to show less of her body and more of the birth team. She also wanted to FaceTune some of the images and permitted me to share edited versions that accommodated some body image preferences. Once she was satisfied with the selected images, I sent back screenshots to confirm the selections I had made for me, as well as her doula and midwife, to confirm I was only going to send and post images from those selections.
What does a typical birth album look like? How many "good" images will I get? When will I receive it?
The above birth included a shoulder dystocia, so additional time was spent carefully organizing these images to make a separate subfolder for those, so she could swipe through the labor and postpartum photos without worrying she would have to swipe past those, and a decent chunk of the edited birth images will not be published publicly. 1,269 images were captured over the course of about 5 hours, many in rapid succession to have better luck at capturing the photo subjects in detail during rapid movement, since the actual birth space was quite dark and required having a very slow shutter speed. She received 128 edited color images, and an additional 72 edited black-and-white images - I might only share about 20 of my favorites on Instagram. There's about 50 images in the above slideshow, and an additional 15-20 in black and white that she consented to sharing publicly. Of the full album, about 1/3 to 1/4 of them were captured during the dystocia, so they are excluded from the images I will ever share online - unless she wants to post them and tag me, of course. Those are generally for her eyes only, but she authorized us midwives sharing them privately offline, during in-person emergency management drills and training classes.
I may share additional/different selections at a later time to highlight her incredible midwife who is about to go on maternity leave and move out of state for a couple of years, as her midwife is also my student preceptor and a role model for me. Most of the time, I only make 1 post about a birth with a limited selection of images, as I don't like to "recycle old content" for the sake of feeding an algorithm and trying to grow a larger audience, unless it's a compilation of photos about a certain topic I'm sharing about. My goal isn't going viral and having thousands of followers worldwide that I've never met. My husband has a rather large online community connected to his Twitch stream, and the size of his community stresses me out a little. I prefer to keep things more intimate and personal.
Unless I've had back-to-back births, ceremonies, and other photography sessions to edit, other professional obligations as a student midwife, vacation plans, or some kind of illness making the rounds in my household to attend to, I'm generally quite fast with editing photos and sending you a link to your digital album. The above birth was delivered about 9 days after the birth. I think the longest one I edited was a traditional Mexican home birth with significantly more images than I'm used to delivering, and a lot of input and guidance from mama, which may have taken about three-ish weeks to finish.
The smaller birth albums I've delivered are the ones where I actually wasn't there as a photographer, and I was just there as a student midwife, but mama delegated the photography to a loved one that couldn't really figure their camera out, and things were moving too quickly for me to help them troubleshoot autofocus issues with an old camera I wasn't familiar with. So I ran to grab my camera, powered it on, adjusted settings, passed it off to grandma, told her to aim and click the button without changing anything else, and got back to charting and assistant tasks as baby was born. As I had free moments to capture extra special moments, I'd snap some photos here and there, otherwise prioritizing student tasks, and most of the photos in her album were postpartum - skin to skin, breastfeeding, newborn exam, family cuddles in bed, and photos with their birth team. I believe I delivered about 30 images of that birth.
Don't delay calling me until right before baby comes out! If it feels really early and you don't want the early labor stuff captured, I can always hang out in the waiting room or go visit a friend nearby so I'm just a few minutes away, instead of all the way across town. One of the biggest factors in the size of your finished album (and therefore the number of your favorite "good" photos) is how quickly you summon me to your birth, how long your labor lasts, the total amount of time I spend at your birth, how much of the birth is taking place in extremely dark conditions that are difficult to photograph in, and how comfortable you are with me capturing intimate and private moments.
Birth Trauma & Privacy
This sweet birth client went through a traumatic placental abruption that ended in an emergency c-section. After about 11 weeks with minimal communication from her, I reached out to ask if she would actually prefer that me & her doula not share these images like we had planned to - and emphasized that her doula & I would completely understand if she didn't want those images to be shared, because we both care about her comfort. I just wanted to be able to follow up with her doula, especially if mama needed some more time and prefer we check in at a later time. She decided to authorize letting us post, including the more difficult emergency images, and she felt it is important to show what birth emergencies look like.
While nobody ever plans to have an emergency c-section to save her and her baby's life, I ask every single client in my service agreement to give me their best judgment of whether or not they would like me to continue capturing photos and videos if an emergency happens. The last thing I want is to feel like I am being too invasive and making your birth trauma worse as you see me positioning myself to capture scary details, or listen to my camera's electronic shutter while you're panicking about what's happening. But for the traumatic births I have captured so far, each mother has expressed that they are extremely grateful to have photos, videos, and text descriptions from my point of view so they can review it later when they're ready. You can bring this material with you to discuss it with your provider in the future, and review how it overlaps with your medical chart.
First and foremost, these images are for you. Your privacy and comfort is my highest priority. The photographers I hate most in the world are paparazzi who invade the most heartbreaking moments to capture a celebrity's heartbreak so they can make tens of thousands of dollars selling it to tabloids, exploiting some of the worst moments of someone's life and invading their privacy to capture what we call "trauma porn." I find it cruel and tasteless, & I've felt that way since I saw Britney shave her head and hit a paparazzi's car with an umbrella on the cover of People Magazine and Us Weekly in 2007.
In regard to birth, I have seen so much value and appreciation when these moments are captured, not just by mom but also her providers. The flood of birth hormones makes your memories a total blur, and the adrenaline distorts your sense of how much time is actually passing while you anxiously wait for your baby to take their first cry. And in the absence of timestamps and metadata, that incorrectly inflated estimate of time only adds to the grief you feel when you remember that moment. You NEVER have to view this material if you don't want to - it can sit in a folder on a USB drive in your computer drawer collecting dust forever if you'd like. And I NEVER have to share these images online - if you decide you want me to delete every copy of those moments that I've captured, I'd gladly do that for you. However, since birth is not a repeatable experience, I can't go back for a do-over to capture these moments if you later decide you wish you could see how things unfolded.
This metadata can actually be extremely helpful for the birth team if we were in an all-hands-on-deck situation and nobody was available to chart when events began and ended. Even to the birth team who isn't experiencing the dramatic surge of birth hormones, the adrenaline we feel often makes us think things took longer than they really did.
You may decide at any time to revoke your authorization to share these images. If you ever authorize images to be shared and later change your mind, please tell me! I will ask you very direct questions before drafting a social media or website post, so we are very clear about what you want and what you are comfortable with. I will do my best to word it in a way that it is clear that the intent is to respect your wishes, not to coerce you to agree to something outside your comfort zone. I am autistic, btw, so if I ask a lot of clarifying questions, I am erring on the side of protecting you in every possible way. The only interest I have in sharing traumatic birth images online is for educational purposes to demonstrate how providers and birth teams work together during emergencies. I'm not interested in exploiting one of the most vulnerable and sensitive moments of a mom's life for the sake of instagram views, and I truly could not care less about likes, followers, comments, etc. I think it would actually stress me out to go viral, and it would especially break my heart to later find out that a mom felt coerced to authorize allowing images to be shared that she wasn't actually comfortable or supportive of sharing. Your honesty is so important here, and you won't offend me by telling me you want to keep images private. No people pleasing allowed! Please be clear about exactly what you want and how you feel so we are on the same page. You are always my priority. Not my audience.