Hold Me Close

Since we got home from the hospital Noelle has been most comfortable sleeping on Kat’s chest. A lot of people would probably recommend that we try getting her in the co-sleeper. And I’m sure all of the “normal” people would have already had their newborn in a separate room in a crib by now, training them to be self-sufficient and to follow a convenient schedule.

But I imagine that when you’ve been in the womb for 10 months and suddenly find yourself in a cold new world you just want to be close to your mom. And laying on her chest is the closest you can get to the only place you’ve experienced constant warmth and safety thus far.

Our job as parents of a newborn is to provide comfort at a time when nothing is comfortable. You can’t do that when you live down the hall or when you resolve to let them “cry it out.” It’s too soon for schedules and self-sufficiency. We are their ambassadors for an uncomfortable transition to a new place, so why would we want to send a message of hopelessness? Welcome, this is what abandonment feels like.

{ The Image }

We’ve been having a really tough time trying to get pictures of Noelle sleeping. She’s so active. But we knew the best way to get her to fall asleep in a certain position was to put her in her favorite position on mom’s chest.

We created the scene on the bed by removing all the covers and pillows. I didn’t want any part of the headboard or back side of the room to be in the picture, nor did I want much detail at all. I just wanted to highlight the form of Noelle lying on Katharine. Shooting at F11 and 1/200 was more than enough to black out everything except for what I wanted to specifically light.

I put one LP160 in a 24″ Lastolite EZBox with a grid behind the two of them on a boom as the key. Behind me was an LP160 in a shoot through umbrella for the slightest amount of fill. I already knew I wanted to convert to black and white. This image is basically straight out of the camera with a little sharpening in Photoshop.