I just adore photographing the blossoming beauty of an expectant mother, although uncomfortable, she is glowing, she has an aura about her, she should be so in love with her body right now, it holds a child, a living, moving child that will need and want her love and nurturing for the rest of its life.
In just a few weeks this child will be born, and will become a huge part of her life, extending her family, this child will be a son or daughter, a grandchild, a cousin, a nephew or niece, a great grand child, adding to the generations before them, a new story is beginning.
Who and what this child will become has a lot to do with the history before they arrived, the lessons taught by parents and grandparents to be passed on to this new child, add to this the amazing inventions that are to come in this child's lifetime.

It just astounds me.

And you dear mother are a goddess!

Cake smashes are just so much fun!
But I have found that probably 75% of the cake smashers aren't really keen on the cakes being offered.
These new 1 year old toddlers are just not used to too much sweetness.

Now you can spend around $70 on a specially made cake (that I see often the little ones don't like much) or you can spend just a bit of time to make a cake that they will love to eat and smoosh around. Little ones lose interest very quickly if the cake is too hard, it needs to be soft and collapse really easily
The cake in the above picture was just a chocolate sponge from the supermarket and iced at home, totally perfect as it fell apart and went everywhere, he loved the texture and the taste. (It actually cleaned up well too as it wasn't all gooey).

There are plenty of healthy options, sugarless and with fruit juice or bananas and yoghurt or cream cheese icings.
For a healthy options and ideas I've come across a few good recipes:

1. Healthy Sugar-Free Banana & Apple Smash Cake
2. Healthy First Birthday Cake
3. Banana Baby Birthday Smash Cake
4. Baby’s First Birthday Cake -“Healthy Smash Cake

Man I love doing maternity sessions, 'Mama to be' looks absolutely glowing and is so ready to be meeting her beautiful little bundle.
Hair, skin and eyes are at their healthiest and 'Mamas to be' all have a look of pure contentment and are ready to nurture.
I love being able to capture that look, that moment in time that all her children in the years to come will look at and know how much their arrival meant to her.

Click the following link for the full story.
 Smile Baby Wordpress blog

Just thought you might like to see a few photos from Lann's cake smash, he loved smashing up his cake... and loved it even more when he realised the cake actually tasted great too. Absolutely priceless!

The cake smash has been booked, and now I need to know how the parents picture it in their minds, colours, favourite themes etc. For this one I was asked to make it for a boy and with a bit of a Maori theme. 
So, I thought, ok, shades of blue which made me think of paua shell, hmm I need to find some paua patterned material, (sometimes in Gisborne it's hard to get some items), but I managed to find some at Bernina 'yay!'.
I then chopped it up into flags, folded tops over and hot glued, threaded nto string and  'voila' a paua shell bunting :).
I hope you enjoy the following photos as much as this wee chap loved his time in the studio.

First birthdays are so much fun, not only for the one year old but also for the parents to celebrate a whole year of firsts. These little tikes grow up so fast you really have to document the milestones to preserve for the future.

I've been thinking lately about just giving my clients their photos on a digital format, will they print the photos out or will they show a few people then throw the disk into a drawer?
It's a digital age now, photos are now shared on social media, they are liked and talked about, then.... ?
The images can also be downloaded from a website holding your personal gallery for a certain amount of time from which you can share and download. A great option, as DVD's will soon be obsolete, but will they get downloaded and printed?

Back in the day, there were no digital files just small back and white prints, later colour prints, from film cameras, we had to print them out to view them and they were all set out in large and small albums and still to this day we can pull them out and talk about the old relatives dating back to the beginning of last century.
Will we still pop a disk into a computer 100 years from now?

I doubt it very much.

As a photographer I must encourage you to enjoy both formats, keep the digital images as back up but you must also have the images printed so they can be enjoyed often and are always available instantly. A print lasts a lifetime and is the most meaningful way of enjoying your image.

Times are changing as we speak, DVDs, CD's and even USB's are becoming obsolete with the influx of the smartphone. Up until recently most homes had a PC or laptop available at home, but now everyone has their own smartphone and can do everything they need to on the phone.

Where are the photo albums? Where is the back up of your family photos?

Everything is now online.... someone else is looking after your images, can we trust they will keep them safe?

Most websites and galleries will last quite a few years, but some will stop being hosted so do some research.
Facebook has been going since February 2004 and doesn't look like slowing down any time soon so we can save a lot of images on there, but they are low quality images, no good for printing and displaying on your wall.
Smartphones will only keep low quality images also no good for printing.
I have sent clients images and they have saved them on their phone and have asked why the images will be no good for print, the phone has resized them so they are phone friendly and now too small for that special canvas to put on your wall or give to Grandma for Christmas.

This link from www.urban75.org has some information on image size for print which may be useful, but to keep your images ready for print I feel you must save them on some form of back up in your home as well as online, the more back up you can have the better off you will be.

I been made aware of another fantastic website that you can physically check your image to see how large you can print, the page has an app you can check exactly how good or bad your image will be for the type of print you want. Check out; www.thecanvasprints.co.uk/image-resolution-for-printing and learn a lot more about pixels per inch and what they mean for your image.


Some of the best online image storage websites I have come across are the following;

• Dropbox
• Flickr
• Amazon Cloud Drive
• Apple Icloud
• Google Photos

So to recap, my advice is to keep your images on a hard drive at home, save your favourites on a specialised online image storage service but most important of all, print the treasured images and keep them in a precious album to be passed down to your children and their children.........

You are preserving your history for future generations.