I speak with Grand Award winner, newborn photographer Kelly Brown, about how she

stands out in a pretty crowded genre, how she gets the inspiration for her work, why

she's built such a structured flow to what she does when she's shooting and

what's next for her. Check it out.

AdoramaTV presents 'The reDefine show' with Tamara Lackey.

Hi Kelly, thank you for joining me.

It's great to be here.

Yes, you came all the way here for this talk from Australia.

Yeah, I did. Just for this.

Just for our little web series interview .

Thank you. You have your practice in Australia but you are internationally

known for your work with newborn photography.

Yeah, it's actually amazing. I get stopped everywhere I go saying I love

your work, and I have no idea how they see it.

You're like what? How did you know this? And how long have you been shooting?

This will be my thirteenth year.

OK, like how did you say, yes this is what I'm going to do? Not only get started in photography but moving very

specifically into the genre of newborn photography.

I had a friend who had a baby and I had been doing photography and they said, you know, would I take some

photos and I really didn't know what I was doing. I had no idea. I'd been

looking at photos on Flickr, on the internet and books and things like that

so I went along and I took some photos that I thought were great at the time.

And then you look back that, yeah, I know that.

and it was so challenging, but like, because babies are so unpredictable

that during the process I just really enjoyed it and then I started to do more. More of my

friends were having babies and yes it was just kind of a bit of a snowball effect.

Yeah and so is that mostly what you do or is it all that you do?

It's pretty much all I do now in terms of my business with my clients, so I focus on one photography.

So I have to ask you this, when you are somebody who is setting kind of a look that a lot of people are doing

now like a style and you're really showing exactly how to do it and such, how do you do that and stand out?

You know it's tough, because, you know, there's so many

photographers now and everybody is inspired by other photographers and

they are buying all their props and materials that they're using from the same places and

a lot of places sell the same things

There's no there's no barrier to entry.

Anybody can come in and get these things. That's right. I suppose when it comes to

the styling of my sessions to sort of give them a look and feel that I love,

it's finding things from the unique places, you know and I'll look outside of prop shops

and things like that. I'll go to fabric stores. I will, you know, have certain

things made specifically for me or I'll be in antique shops and hardware stores

and find little things that I can sort of introduce into my shoots and they're

one offs, which is great so that means that, you know, my images will start to sort of have their own

unique sort of look and feel.

I remember last year at a print competition, I didn't know

at the time it was your print, but your print came up and it was the ginormous

flower. What was that exactly?

Oh, God, that was that was kind of crazy because I was

looking through a fashion magazine and there was this woman wearing a yellow

shirt and it was I think for a spring collection and there was this giant, white flower

behind her in the image and at the time I thought that would be kind of cool so I just

took a picture of it with my phone

and then it was a couple of months later, I was going through the photos on my

phone. I saw it again and I thought I'm going to make that. I'm going to challenge myself to make a

giant flower so we recorded the process

of making the flower and it is part of one of my Creative Life classes.

Oh lovely. So what did you do?

Yeah, so I just got sheets of foam core and I'm not actually sure of the name

of it but it's like the underlay that you put under your carpet when you lay carpet.

Oh yeah, like a rug mat? Rug protector?

Yeah and I just used that to create the flower. I created a pattern from the photograph

and enlarged it and yeah, it was good.

It was an exquisit photo too, like so well done.

Well it was different and it's funny, because, you know, as we talk about trends and things

like that, you know, it starts to sort of make other people think 'I would love to do that.'

I am going to have the giant flower photo yeah and you see that a lot. You do see that

duplicated and triplicated etc and then what about photographing multiples?

You definitely have worked with twins and triplets and, you know, how are you

finding that different than working with just a newborn?

You're trying to get them to look comfortable together, is always a challenge and for me as a photographer, you

know, I'm thinking about what it is that my clients want, the specific things.

They want timeless images, they want their baby to be the center of the photograph, you know, the main sort of

subject of the image and they want timeless images that look

comfortable of their baby and you see so many photos of babies looking uncomfortable so the

challenge with working with multiples is how do you get them together to look comfortable?

All at the same time?

Yeah and I have twins of my own so it's always been a bit of fun

photographing them when they were babies

and now I get to meet other multiple mums and come up with

unique images for them. It's kind of cool.

Is it just a matter of either infinite patience which,

maybe mixed in, with like certain, you know, hey if I put them this way they seem

to calm down, is it a combination of that?

Yeah, definitely. Patience is key. I mean

you'll have one baby sound asleep and the others wide awake or what have you, so

during the shoot, like, I'll work with them however they are, like I don't sort of go in with a

plan, like I'm going to do this, this and this. Instead I just wait for the both of them

to be sleep and then I'll photograph them together and I'll look at the way that

they sort of naturally lie. How they move and then yeah, sort of work with them and

what they're comfortable with.

Yeah, kind of whatever approaches you, you deal with.

Yeah and a lot of the times, you know, certain things that I do are influenced by my clients because I always

want to create images that they love so I'm not going to, sort of, go in to shoot and say right I would

like to do this for you today because they might not like that so I

get as much input from them as possible about what they love and always ask them if they've

seen something like and then we'll create something specifically for them.

What is the average length of time for one of your shoots?

I tell my client's 2-4 hours but I'm sort

of around the two to 2 1/2 hours at the moment, you know it allows them to sort of come in, relax.

They've got the expectation, yeah.

And yeah I just give them room to move, like room to breathe because when you have a new baby

you've got...like, everything changes and you're coming to a new place, new environment for a shoot and you're

anxious, you're nervous, you're about to hand your brand new baby over to someone that you've just met.

So I allow that little bit of extra time just to make sure that they're nice and relaxed and calm.

Yeah that's smart. What's the longest you've ever done? What's the longest it's ever taken?

Four and a half hours and that was with triplets.

Yeah it would be.

Three babies.

That's funny. From a business perspective obviously being able to be so successful,

what would you feel like are the things that have helped you really separate

yourself in terms of having a smarter business?

You know for me I have to work smarter not harder, so you know what it's like. We get busy and if

you're not pricing yourself right, if you're not marketing yourself right then you know it

just becomes chaotic so it's putting the right sort of structures and systems in place to make sure

everything sort of runs smoothly but yeah I think...

Are you doing that yourself? Do you have a team?

Yeah it's pretty much just me. My husband does all the money, the sort of dollar side of things. He looks

after all my book keeping

That's nice. That's convenient.

I was doing it and I just didn't enjoy it and I didn't fully

understand, you know, everything that I could do from a business perspective

and understanding, you know, the Tax system and things like that. It was...

He just understands it. It was smart just to say right you look after that and I'll do all the other side of things.

And do your work with assistants on your shoots?

No I don't. I have parents actually help me.

OK, you're just kind of 'hey, since you're here anyway for a few hours...'

Yeah and they love being part of the process

and there's nothing worse than a parent sort of sitting back and feeling a little helpless or kind of

just wondering what's going on and

not being a part of it and I suppose it's the key to how successful I've become is

because my clients have such incredible experiences that they tell everyone about it so

when it comes to setting yourself apart you know you want your clients to be able to tell everyone

about their experience and how unique it was and how good it made them feel.

And for newborn portraits what kind of variety would you say deliver

after the shoot? Would you say that there's maybe one pose multiple times,

3 or 4 poses?

Do you feel...is that something that you go into with the mindset of I'm going to deliver

it this way or is it just we'll see what happens?

Yeah I definitely have like a session workflow so I know I can do, you know, say

for example, four poses on a posing bag and I'm going to get eleven shots. I offer my clients 20

images after the shoot so then I know that I'm going to go into doing a couple of

props, things like that and I'm going to do parents shots so at the end of the shoot...

So you're following a flow?

Yeah I have like a structure and then like I have a back up plan because if the baby's awake...

Everything's gone wrong! Plan B!

When the baby's awake and not sleeping I'll sort of shift things around and

maybe do a bit back-to-back, but I'm sort of planning on doing probably about

six to seven set ups with the baby to get my 20 images.

OK what is the most challenging part of newborn photography?

Oh, it's just... I think it's the having the patience and

the challenges trying not to put too many expectations on yourself because

you know I think today photographers go in, they see the beautiful photos, they

go in, they want to create them and then they feel like they can't do it. It's just learning to go easy

on yourself, I think. We often put too many expectations on ourselves so we have to slow down

Amen.

And work with the baby and deliver what our client wants. Not worrying about what other photographers

are doing or whether or not a photographer will like the images that we create

because businesses aren't based around other photographers unless, of course, you have a product

In which case it's kind of built around them.

But when you're working for your clients, it's whether or not they love the images and

that's what's important so yeah, try not to have too many expectations. At the beginning of every shoot

I take the baby and I sit for probably two minutes and I just touch it and I see how it responds to

my touch and then I know how it reacts, how I need to be able to work with it for the rest of the session

That's awesome. So you do... It's funny. I do something similar with

children. It's obviously very, very different but I just kind of more like feel the

energy, which sounds like what you're doing as well but more like

interaction and such. So you obviously are doing a fair amount of teaching as well.

Tell us about the baby summit. What is this?

So I came up with this idea about two years ago now to create like a retreat for photographers and there are

a lot of photographers out there that don't know where to go for the right

information and they're learning from the wrong places, so we decided to put

together a three-day event and

became bigger than what we ever expected . We had 300 attendees in Australia last year.

Oh wonderful.

20 speakers and some of my amazing friends

came out and spoke and it was incredible, so after that we were like

well we need to do this again and with that we had a lot a response from the US and now we're bringing

Let's go to another continent!

I know! So we're going to be in Atlanta, October 1st, 2nd and 3rd and we have 33 speakers.

Wow, that's a full on thing.

It's insane. It's insane.

So baby summit is not actually a summit for babies?

Nope. It's for, basically, newborn, maternity, birth and older baby photographers.

So birth photography too?

Yeah, which has become quite popular

It really has.

But what we wanted to focus on, because a lot of new photographers enter the baby genres,