A Thank You for Photos

Before I move out of “birth blog mode” and back to our regularly scheduled posts about knitting and food and playing with life’s mundanities, I have one last shout out to make. And that’s to Sara, who is Bona fide Photography. This post includes some of her remaining shots that I haven’t already shared.

I had really lucked out with N’s birth that there were a lot of extra hands on deck – enough extra people that my camera could get passed around, and I got some truly amazing pictures to remember that experience.

But I knew that this time around, that would probably not be an option. I didn’t have as many birth helpers that I was inviting, and there was no reason to expect that extra personnel would be available at the midwife center. I wasn’t sure what I would do except bring my camera and hope for the best. It didn’t even occur to me to look for a professional birth photographer, partly because the idea seemed a little odd to me still, and partly because I thought I could never afford one.

Enter Sara. A card on the bulletin board at the midwife center announced, quite candidly, “free birth photography!” and had Sara’s ad. This sounded too good to be true, but I looked her up and we exchanged some emails. No joke: she was really offering free sessions, because although she’s an experienced photographer, she was new to the birth photography thing, so she was building up a portfolio.

We were pretty late in the pregnancy by then, but it turned out that one of the perks of M coming on the later side was that I got a chance to meet Sara ahead of time. Labor is such a crazy sensitive time, and every woman is different. For me, I knew that by the time I was in LaborLand I would be on another planet and I wouldn’t care who was there, unless they were some kind of horrible screaming lunatic. But who knows – some women are really sensitive, and maybe I would be this time. Either way, one wants to give a little thought to who is going to be in the room when you give birth.

I knew within five minutes of meeting Sara that she was just the sort of person who I’d be comfortable with in the room. She was so sweet, very knowledgeable about natural birth, and so passionate about capturing that experience. She is clearly getting into birth photography because she loves it.

As you can see, she did an amazing job. She caught all the moments that I’d hoped would be caught on camera, and many other moments that could not have been anticipated. There are a lot of pictures that I’m not going to share publicly because, well, body parts. Mine, to be exact. But I will treasure them. There’s one in particular – Jared giving me a kiss with a screaming fresh baby on my chest – it is so perfectly intimate and spontaneous I pretty much cry every time I look at it.

And she managed to take all these pictures with me barely knowing she was there.

So a big thank you, and a big shout out to Sara. If you are birthing at the Midwife Center in the Strip District, I’d definitely recommend looking her up. Looking through her blog, her family/toddler/baby shoots are also really fun.

Having these pictures is a huge gift and blessing to us, and we wish Sara all the success in the world with this new venture!