But there is a host of other scenarios that are seldomly thought of when you are entering this world. I'd love to share some of the challenges I had to overcome when I first started documenting birth almost five years ago.
Being a birth photographer in south Florida (I work mainly at Boca Raton Regional Hospital but I can be capturing a birth anywhere from Jupiter to Miami depending on my client) is definitely the greatest challenge your career as a photographer will ever face.
Knowing you will get a call in the middle of the night definitely puts a lot of stress on a person's shoulders. How do you sleep really soundly knowing you may miss a call if you sleep too soundly? You must take measures to ensure a phone call will wake you at night.
It means you can’t stay up just a little bit later, just a little bit longer and watch your favorite show because the new episode just came out. I miss that especially much - I am a proud TV nerd ;)
You also can't have a second glass of wine to unwind. You can’t go visit that friend or family member who lives in the opposite direction of your birth client. You can't go to places where you have no cell phone signal for longer than half an hour.
Being a birth photographer, I don’t have a partner who I would be able to easily send to a client if I am out to dinner with my husband or at a concert or out of town.
Granted I have absolutely reliable and talented back up birth photographers who are on call for me in the event that I have two clients whose due dates end up overlapping because one of them went into preterm labor for example, or becomes high risk in their third trimester.
However, I would never send my back up photographer unless I am having an absolute emergency, (such as my kids being in the emergency room *knock on wood*).
There’s not very many of us birth photographers down here in south Florida.
There are even fewer birth videographers.
I can only count three.
We don’t earn a steady paycheck on a monthly basis. If we have a birth client, we get paid. If we don’t have any birth clients for a specific month of the year, we have to make the money from a previous month stretch over the course of a few months. So we try our best to work with every birth client ourselves so we do not have to pay our back ups.
So when I get a call at 3 o’clock in the morning that I am needed at a birth, I have to very quickly overcome the psychological setbacks that may affect a photographer from having the motivation to do this as a career choice.
It’s the same motivation you find within you when you are an athlete and a have to push yourself to get up out of bed at 5 o’clock in the morning and train.
There’s a part of you that so doesn’t want to and feels like it’s such a vulnerable moment for you where the id is trying to take over and make your decisions for you.
