Is Birth Photography a Luxury Service?
I can see how birth photography could be confused for luxury services, such as glamour newborn photography in a high end studio.
In this week’s post, we will break it down and find out if birthing photography is a luxurious service, or the most important investment of your life as you transform into a parent
Why is the investment so large?
When you hire a birthing photographer to be on-call for your pregnancy leading up to your birth, a very significant portion of the investment you are making goes towards having that professional personally on-call just for one mother.
You are unable to give your photographer any certainty at all of when you will give birth, it could be at 40 weeks, but it could very well be at 36 weeks or even 41.5 weeks and this changes from baby to baby, (yes all three pregnancies can be completely different even with the same mother!) So while most birth workers are available on-call from 37 weeks, because my sister in law give birth at 36 weeks instead of 37, and also one of my home birth clients who was expecting her second baby gave birth at 34 weeks instead of 37-41, and had to transfer to the hospital, and lastly, because one of my first time mom client’s water ruptured at 33 weeks and had to have her baby a few days later, I choose to be on-call for each of my clients for the last 3 months of their pregnancy, (and another 2 weeks if they’re still pregnant until 42 weeks) in the event of an unexpected medical emergency that changes their due date by a couple of weeks or a couple of months.
There is no way to predict how long you'd need your photographer for, as every labor is different. And while five years of live action childbirth education and experience has helped me to understand when active labor truly begins and how to arrive at births when women are closer to 7 centimeters dilated so that I am only present for the last few hours of labor prior to baby being born, active labor can sometimes be tricky to truly diagnose, and looks different for every single woman and YES, different from pregnancy to pregnancy. One woman’s active labor may mean I am with her for 6 hours before baby is born while for another woman, things may be looking like active labor and then 18 hours and 8 cups of coffee later, their baby is born.
Don’t forget the most important part of your financial investment, besides a professional, well experienced in the physiological aspect of birth and capturing birth during any lighting or environmental circumstances being personally on-call just for one mother, having that experienced and educated professional with you at your birth, unknowledgeable of how long, don’t forget to include your investment of the actual photography into the overall financial investment.
Individual, Mother-to-Photographer Experience
On-call personalized birth photography on such an individual mother-to-photographer experience is very new to the world, and there are barely any reliable birth workers in South Florida for me to be able to expand my practice and share on-call time with the way midwives and OBGYNS alternate the days they are on-call, (so when you go into labor, you get the provider on call that day).As oppose to this rotation model, I am on-call practically 365 days in the year, in 2018 I was off-call and able to turn off my phone for exactly 4 days.
Being on-call is not inexpensive
As an example of how being on-call for each of my clients impacts the financial investment you make, I was not able to take a vacation with my family for the first 5 years of being a birth photographer, because that would mean I would have to turn down birth clients for a four to eight to twelve week periods of time (with me being on-call for clients for 3 months of their pregnancy), and being the person who supports my family financially by 90% we would not make it possible.
Birth photography is deeply therapeutic visual healing, especially for women who are extra emotional or sensitive (like me), for women who unexpectedly experience post partum depression, for women who experience traumatic birth (either physically traumatic or emotionally) and either during the birth I photograph or in a previous delivery, and are hoping to find emotional healing with the next baby’s birth.
100% Personalized ONLY to You
100% personalized because your baby is only your baby
100% personalized because you only meet your baby once in your lifetime
Birth photography is 100% personalized, personalized attention from your photographer to you, during the last three full months of your pregnancy and any amount of hours during labor, whether 6 or 18, as well as high resolution decade-of-education in-office photo digital editing post birth (that often takes as long as the actual birth).
Myth: Only Wealthy Families Can Afford It
I think that in five years and over 100 families I have only had one person who is a millionaire as a client, the rest of my families have had to budget out for me over every week of their pregnancy and often had to wait until their next pregnancy to work with me.
The value of a deeply personalized service that is unique to a baby who will only be born and met by his parents once in a lifetime is determined by every individual family.
