Yes! It's up to you how much I engage with you at your birth. If me standing quietly near you and capturing photos without engaging in conversation won't feel awkward or intrusive to you, I'm happy to do that. Some clients are really chatty and have a great sense of humor, and we end up talking a lot to pass the time. Others need a lot of emotional support, encouragement, and ideas for positions or comfort measures to try next. Some providers request we minimize chatter so they can focus. It's your birth space - please communicate with everyone what your expectations are!

Every birth photography client is asked to fill out my agreement form, which asks if you'd prefer traumatic moments to be captured or not. It's very important to me to emphasize that the intent is not to exploit a mama's trauma for social media content - it is to provide a resource that may facilitate processing and healing.

• Mom's privacy and comfort is most important, always. Traumatic images are not something I even consider sharing on social media, and I consider those photos just for her. I have later delicately asked some moms if they would feel comfortable allowing me to share certain images to make tactful educational posts with trigger warnings about birth emergencies, but I ALWAYS emphasize that if she is even the least bit uncomfortable with that idea, to please tell me no.
• The images taken during traumatic moments are uploaded into a clearly labeled trauma folder. This allows you to confidently open the main folder and swipe through the non-traumatic images without worrying that you're going to stumble into the harder moments if you aren't careful.
• Please let me know if you're comfortable with private/revealing photos to be shown to interested birth photography clients that are curious what having these moments photographed may look like, so they can make an informed decision. If we didn't discuss this in advance, I may ask you if you consent to me showing the images to other moms who are preparing for birth and have questions about birth trauma - exclusively in-person and offline to prevent sneaky screenshots.
• Images are incredibly helpful later to process birth trauma when you're ready, as it's really common for the flood of birth hormones to make everything except the most critical details a total blur. If you're not confident about whether you'd want to see it or not, I'd encourage you to lean toward yes. You can always choose to never view them, but we can never go back to re-capture them later if you have questions about your birth.
• The image metadata includes timestamps that are often used by the birth team immediately after the birth to make sure your medical chart accurately reflects the sequence of events, especially if we were in an all-hands-on-deck situation where nobody was available to chart things in real time and nobody was able to look at the clock to say times out loud for recalling APGAR scores at 1 minute, 5 minutes, and 10 minutes post birth. I have captured multiple shoulder dystocias and newborn resuscitations in birth photos, and they have repeatedly been a very helpful reference for the midwives.

Preferably when you're telling anyone else you're pretty sure you're in labor.

If you're calling your mom to have her come pick up your older kids, if you're calling your midwife to let her know you'll be driving to the birth center, if you're calling your husband to tell him it's time to drive home... then it's time to notify me that things are happening. It allows me to quadruple-check that all of my gear is packed and ready, batteries are charged, child care plans are arranged if we need to take them to a grandma or aunt's home, I've got my water bottle and snacks prepared, my gas tank is filled up, I've confirmed my husband will be available to take our kids to school or pick them up, give him extra time to offload meetings to his team, etc. Even if you're not ready to summon me to your birth just yet, and you'd prefer I hang out in the waiting room on standby, the heads-up is SUCH an appreciated courtesy.

Vivid hues, dark shadows, a shallow depth of field for beautifully blurry foregrounds and backgrounds, and accurate skin tones to the best of my ability.

I don't believe in whitewashing gorgeous brown skin for the sake of a "glowy" birth photo style. I don't bring my flash to births, as I find it incredibly intrusive to mama and baby. I don't believe in blinding babies just because a room is dark, and I prefer to be less disruptive to your birth experience. I bring supplemental mood lighting, such as battery powered candles, string lights, and a galaxy lamp, to ensure my camera has enough ambient lighting to focus on subjects without missing the once-in-a-lifetime moments. I feel that preserving the darkness of the actual space beautifully captures the feeling that birth is a true liminal space between this life and beyond. If we have plenty of natural daylight coming through large windows, great! I love being able to provide those bright glowy images that are so popular with birth photography.

Images I share on my social media and website are limited to what you're comfortable with, period.

Generally, my social media posts keep things pretty modest. I don't expect that graphic images of babies crowning will ever be connected to my social media profile, unless a mama wants to post those images to her own social media page and tag me as the birth photographer, or a midwife/birth center has gotten consent to share the images for educational purposes about birth emergency management.

• Whatever your preferences are, we'll have a call where we discuss the types of birth photography you do and don't like. You can browse birth photography images, and send me photos that demonstrate exactly how comfortable you are with certain body parts being shared on my website and social media, as well as what you'd like to see in your private album.
• Not sure what you'd like? I'd say most of my clients are comfortable seeing their baby crowning in their private images, but the most we're both typically comfortable sharing online is an un-blurred nipple with their baby on their chest, and a cropped-in side profile of the moment someone was catching her baby where her vulva or perineum is blocked by her thigh or out of frame.
• We can sometimes crop, or obscure images with blurring/text boxes, to create more social media friendly versions of the images. Generally, I err on just not sharing those photos.

I am often pleasantly surprised at just how well my camera handles ultra-low-light scenarios.

If the birth team is able to safely navigate your dark birth space without tripping over obstacles, it's probably light enough for me to capture the moment in at least black-and-white. If you need your birth space to be absolutely black due to overstimulation and exhaustion, we likely won't capture photos during those moments. I love keeping the birth space as dark as possible to maximize natural oxytocin production, and I feel that some of my best work was captured in birth spaces where we had little more than moonlight to work with.

We pivot and work together to schedule other services of your choice. Precipitous labor is wild and unpredictable- the fastest one I've attended was just 52 minutes from water breaking, getting called in, driving to the birth center, and barely catching her baby in the parking lot. Life happens. Kids get the flu. Traffic and weather love to strike during the most urgent birth scenarios. Child care is unavailable or further away than expected. Hormonal migraines don't wait until it's convenient. As a result, I cannot guarantee attendance - especially if you forget to notify me in a timely manner.

If you'd be devastated that I missed your birth, don't wait until you're 7cm dilated, your water is broken, and you have an epidural before you notify me that it's baby time. I would rather be at a birth 3 hours longer than necessary and have the opportunity to capture early labor photos while things are still very relaxed, instead of speeding on the freeway and stressing at every red light hoping I can make it there in time to capture baby's first cry.

Depending on how much notice I'm given, I MIGHT be able to have a backup photographer for your birth. This is much easier to accomplish with doulas than it is with birth photographers, unfortunately, as most photographers are booked several months in advance and take a limited client load, so a backup being available on super short notice is generally unlikely. If a backup is not available, and I'm unable to attend your birth due to circumstances like precipitous births, hormonal aura migraines, child care arrangements, or I've already been called to a birth as a student with one of my midwifery preceptors, I'm happy to offer Fresh 48 photography, a closing of the bones ceremony, in-home lifestyle photos of your family, a family portrait session, a postpartum birth processing visit, postpartum doula visits, a postpartum goody package, etc. depending on your preferences and what is most convenient for you.

I require a 50% deposit to put you in my calendar and start turning down other client opportunities.

Ideally, the remainder of my fee is paid before your birth... but babies are expensive, birth is expensive, the job market and the economy are a dumpster fire right now, and I understand if we need to work out a longer term payment plan and a later photo album delivery timeline.

I am also happy to accommodate alternative compensation if you or your partner operate a small business & are interested in exchanging services such as esthetics, landscaping, pest control, construction, car detailing, music lessons, etc.

Failure to pay for my photography services will result in your album being withheld until full payment has been received. Please do not make me harass you to get paid for the dozens of hours of work I put into our arrangement. I'd rather not have to get the courts or a collections agency involved to be compensated for my time and energy.

I do not offer refunds for my services within 60 days of your due date, since you can't refund the time and energy I put into services I have already provided to you, or compensate me for the clients I turned away for you.

My services often begin months before your birth, and I adjust my entire family's lifestyle for the full calendar month surrounding your due date, planning vacations and concert tickets months in advance around due date windows.

Please communicate with me if concerns or compatibility issues arise that make it necessary for our arrangement to change, or if a termination of our professional agreement would be in everyone's best interest.

1-2 weeks on average, but my formal estimate is within 30 days. Albums are not delivered until you have paid in full.

When my schedule isn't very packed with midwifery and doula trainings and sick children at home, I've been able to deliver finished birth albums rather quickly - I think my record was about 4-5 days after the birth.

Of course, if mitigating circumstances do arise, I'm very communicative about delays & how I anticipate they'll affect my expected timeline to deliver your album. I like to send preview images within the first 1-2 days so we can discuss editing preferences and make stylistic adjustments before I deep-dive into refining several dozen images.

I highly encourage everyone to make at least 2 physical backups and 1 online backup of all priceless images, in the event of natural disasters or tragedies that destroy your belongings. As we say in tech support: your data is only as important as the backups you make, so if you didn't make any, it must not have been that important.

I typically make Google Drive albums available to download for a minimum of 90 days after a birth, before moving the album to an Archive subfolder (which breaks the link) for back-end organization. I can alternatively deliver them via a USB drive you provide, or I can offer you one at cost for about $10.

In addition to the Google Drive backups of client albums, I regularly save my own hard copy backups to 2 hard drives: a 2TB SSD connected to my laptop, and a 14TB external HDD connected to my PC, but I do not guarantee lifetime storage.

It depends on how long you have me at your birth. Generally you'll receive a color version and black-and-white version of all images captured with sufficient ambient lighting.

Bare minimum numbers at a precipitous (fast) birth will typically yield 25-30 images, even if we mostly just had time to capture immediate postpartum moments like skin-to-skin, the newborn exam, breastfeeding, family bonding, introducing older siblings, and a group photo with your provider if desired. If I'm at your birth for longer periods, and I'm able to capture more moments through the labor, birth, and postpartum process, we'll typically get closer to 60-100 final images. The most I've ever sent was 160 (doubled by black-and-white versions).

When I'm at births for 6-12 hours, it's common for me to shoot 1000+ images in bursts, with plenty of longer gaps between photo opportunities so I'm not capturing the same photo 600 times. I do my best to make sure we have a wide variety of moments captured through the entire birth, and capture multiple frames and perspectives to select from, just in case someone's making a silly expression while talking, or their eyes are half closed.