A baby's first year: the stages worth photographing

There is a sentence I hear almost every week, usually from a mother holding her phone: "I don't know how he changed so much, so fast." In a single year, a baby goes from a curled-up newborn to a person who crawls, pulls themselves up, laughs, protests and has opinions about everything. Twelve months. And then it doesn't come back.

That is why I love following babies through their first year rather than photographing them just once. Not to fill the diary. It is because each stage gives you a portrait no other stage can, and when you see them side by side something appears that a single photograph can never show: the story.

The first stage is the first two weeks. That is the newborn session, with the baby still curled up, sleeping deeply, tiny inside their parents' hands. It is the only stage where their body still remembers the womb, and it is desperately short — fourteen days.

Somewhere between three and four months, one of the loveliest changes happens. The baby can hold their head up, can lie on their tummy and look straight ahead, and above all smiles on purpose. It is no longer a sleep reflex: it is a smile aimed at someone. Their gaze is wide awake at this stage, and it gives me the most expressive portraits of the whole year.

Between six and eight months, they sit up on their own. It sounds small, but it changes the entire photograph: sitting, back straight, hands free, they look like a little person rather than a baby lying down. It is also the stage before they can move around, which in practice means they stay where you put them — any parent of a ten-month-old knows exactly what that is worth.

From nine to twelve months, everything accelerates. Crawling, pulling up on furniture, standing, those first steps holding one hand. Sessions become much more about movement and much less about posing, and I love that. I stop asking the baby for anything and simply follow them. The photographs take on the feel of someone caught in the middle of a discovery.

Then the birthday arrives, with the smash the cake session. It is probably the most fun I have all year. We set the scene, the cake comes in — included in the package, so it isn't one more thing on the parents' list — and what happens next is entirely up to the baby. Some attack it with both hands within three seconds. Others touch it with one finger, look at mum for permission and sit there thinking about it. Some cry because they hate the texture. Every one of those reactions makes a wonderful photograph, and not one of them can be planned.

When parents ask how many sessions to do, I tell them any combination works as long as it is sustainable for them. Four moments — newborn, sitting, crawling and the birthday — cover the year very fully. Even two, like newborn and smash the cake, already show an enormous contrast. What I do recommend is deciding early, because the stages don't wait: you can't recover the six-month window in November.

There is a practical advantage to this that rarely gets mentioned. When a baby sees me a few times over the year, the studio stops being a strange place. At eight or nine months, the age when many babies react badly to new faces, I am no longer a stranger — and you can see that ease in the photographs.

At the end of the year, what you are left with isn't a set of sessions. It is a sequence in which you watch a person appear. And honestly, that is worth more than any single photograph, however beautiful.