Creating Halloween-inspired newborn fine art

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Tara Ruby is a whiz when it comes to fine art portraiture for newborns, and she has been putting her creative mind into overdrive lately! Read on as she inspires us to take a closer look at newborn composites with Halloween (or any holiday!) themes.

If you’re a lover of Halloween and everything that goes along with this amazing holiday (and a newborn photographer), I’m sure you have thought at least once throughout the year about creating holiday-inspired images with your Sept-Oct babies. I know I was like that for a long time and made the plunge a few years ago into capturing Halloween specific images for my studio!

I feel like all year long could be Halloween but I really focus on the season around mid-September and since many moms will deliver on Halloween itself, I’ll shoot Halloween until around mid-November to give all of my moms the chance to enjoy these images. I consider these images fine art composites, and many of them are digital composites. Your only limitation is your imagination, your client’s imagination, and your vendors’ creations. I work closely with Pitter-Pat Creations and Off My Hooks throughout this season, starting our conversations on outfits and costumes early on in the summer to make sure we have all the items we need to create the final images.

Many of my inspirations come from movies that are popular either that year or during the Halloween season itself. I’ve used dry ice (like the one with my vampire newborn) and composited baby into items like a coffin. You read that right … a coffin! I’ve found that if you made the newborn cute still, such as adding cute little canines, you can “get away with it.” I also have found that I acquire clients that are drawn to a darker edited image, and images that I navigate creatively. Most clients literally come into my studio now, hand me their newborns, and tell me to make magic happen.

These aren’t images that you can create on the fly. I make sure that I have props, wraps and backgrounds that will all work well together. Intuition Background by Becky has a new to-go pack which are backgrounds perfectly sized for working with smaller setups, perfect for newborn portrait sessions!

If you aren’t someone that does detailed and challenging digital work, simple shelf baby images can work well as well. Jack o’ Lanterns will never go out of style, add a few colorful leaves and you brighten up an image and make Winnie the Pooh look perfect for the holiday season! I challenge you to look around your studio and even your home and see which Halloween decorations you could use to make an amazing Halloween newborn fine art portrait!

Finally, the ability to add to an image in photoshop allows us to paint clown faces, turn faces green like Frankenstein and add elements to our images that we couldn’t previously do. No one in their right mind would try to actually paint a clown’s face on a precious Dumbo clown image, but we can now post edit. So take a chance, go out on a limb and be creative. You might just be surprised at the feedback you get from your clients! Need some ideas? Feel free to check out my digital background shop on Etsy and feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions at info@tararuby.com. Happy Halloween!! 

We can’t wait to have Tara at the Reset Conference in March. Be sure to buy your ticket, sign up for her class, and direct message her for $50 off your ticket!

Tara Ruby is deeply embedded into military life, being a disabled veteran and a military spouse. She has a sincere love of working to support our US Military and the families nestled within. She has worked to pioneer her own personal style of motherhood and military photography that has earned awards from organizations such as the Wedding and Portrait Photographers International (WPPI), the Professional Photographers of America (PPA), The National Association of Professional Child Photographers (NAPCP) as well as within the Army community. Among hundreds of international publications, her photography has been shared on Facebook over 3.5 million times and featured in Vanity Fair, USA Today, Parents, SELF Magazine, The Huffington Post, Time Magazine and many more. Cosmopolitan magazine has called her work “stunning,” “powerful” and notes that her work caused “the internet to lose its collective mind” and the Gulf Coast Breastfeeding Center said, “Tara Ruby is to Breastfeeding as Ansel Adams was to landscape.” She was also a finalist in Ron Howard’s Project Imaginat10n contest, has images in the full-feature documentary, Homecoming The Film and has her image displayed in the US Army Women’s museum in Fort Lee, VA. Tara is a graduate of the New York Institute of Photography, holds an Associate’s title with WPPI and will receive her Photography Craftsman Degree with PPA in 2020. Tara is sponsored by Tamron.

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