Lily Bella Photography

Eliana

We spent the week after Christmas in Wisconsin visiting my husband's family. While we were there, we got to meet our beautiful new niece Eliana! She is the sweetest thing ever. We all LOVED getting a chance to hold and cuddle with her. And I was sooo excited to take some photos of her for Ben and Jenelle. What a perfect little model this girl was! She was awake and alert for the entire 2+ hours we photographed her. She hardly complained, except for a few moments here and there. She was intrigued by the whole process. So much so, that this was the first time she was awake for the entire morning! And then she promptly slept for pretty much the rest of the day. Not sure, her parents were too pleased with that because the night was probably rough for them. But check out how adorable this little peanut is! I have a feeling you'll be seeing her every few months or so because I'll want to take pictures of her whenever I can!

Hoffman Siblings

It was so fun to meet the Hoffman family! The kids were so sweet and such good listeners! Ava was a perfect little model and Lachlan (LOVE that name!) did a great job listening to me. Little Baby Porter though. Oh man, he sure was cute but really loved his Mama to hold him (but what baby doesn't! ;-). Every time we tried to set him down I had about 2 seconds before he would start crying. We tried and tried. I did get some cute shots of him. Just not quite as posed as we were hoping for.

This is my new red background! I am sooo excited about it! Definitely keep it in mind if you are doing a studio session with me. I really love this photo and the way it pops. I'm really looking forward to taking some holiday photos on this too! I have a lot of fun props hanging around begging to get thrown in there.

 

Kyla

It was a dark and gloomy day....no, this isn't the start of an Edgar Allen Poe story. It's the story of my studio sessions here at the house! I think the Oliveira family has been the only session here where the sun was shining!  But I got to hang out with cutie pie Kyla! She's my cousin's newborn baby girl and we had some fun setups for her. But she didn't feel like going to sleep as hard as we tried! I'm not sure what it is with baby girls (awake) versus baby boys (sleepers)! Perhaps it's that the girls don't want to miss their big debut modeling moment and the boys could care less? :-)

At any rate, I got to hang out with my cousin Andrea and Aunt Diane while we attempted to get Kyla to sleep. And I grabbed these shots in the midst of it all.

Her room is a zoo theme and they brought all these animals to set up for this shot!

The Oliveira Family

I had the opportunity to meet the nicest family on Sunday! They had the sweetest little newborn named Rafael! He slept almost the entire session and his awesome mom Leticia brought almost all the props we used for the session! I had so much fun working with them. I can't believe I never thought to use a Pillow Pet before for a photo prop! We have a leopard and a ladybug in residence. Without further ado, here's Baby Rafael:

 

And his gorgeous sister, Camila! I am in love with this next shot...LOVE the angle!

And the whole adorable family!

Isabelle

This little sweetie is going to give her mama a run for her money. She was one of the most alert and AWAKE newborns I've ever seen! She stayed awake for the whole session and then promptly fell asleep as soon as she got into her carseat again. :-) The stinker.

We couldn't quite pose her as much as I usually like because she was awake. But I still managed to get some cute shots. She was very calm and zen during much of the session, when she wasn't trying to lick and eat my fuzzy blanket.

I was even more excited to meet this little one than others because I've known her mama, Claire since middle school. As you can see, I got my baby toes fix! ;-)

 

Edited to add: I just finished editing all of Isabelle's photos and had to add two more:

 

I know her eyes are half closed in that top one, but doesn't she just look like she's up to something? ;-)

Newborn photos

I finally got around to editing the photos I took of Kellan. Some are when he's five days old and others are when he's 20 days old. It was a lot of fun working with a newborn baby. I can completely understand now why other photographers want to work with newborns before they are 14 days old. Kellan was a much more cooperative model (aka solidly alseep) at five days old than he was at 20 days old. He didn't want to stay asleep at all for the second session. But I was still able to get most of the shots I was hoping to get. I hope I get the opportunity to photograph a newborn again. It's fun creatively to try and come up with poses and setups. I'd love to try and stretch my creativity more in this area.

Below are a few of his shots and there are a bunch more in the "Kellan" album on the left sidebar.

 

If I actually sent out birth announcements, they would probably look something like this with all the pertinent birth information listed on the back.

 

He's probably going to hate me someday for that one above. ;-) If he was born in the summer months, I would have taken this setup to the local little farm market down the road and shot it "on location".