What Anne Geddes Actually Does in the Studio (And What Working Photographers Can Steal From It)

What Anne Geddes Actually Does in the Studio (And What Working Photographers Can Steal From It)

There’s a particular kind of photographer I pay close attention to: the ones who built their entire visual language from scratch, without a formal framework to lean on. Anne Geddes is exactly that. Self-taught, starting at 25, working out of a converted bedroom in Australia before she ever had a proper studio, she developed one of the most recognizable bodies of work in photography history. When CreativeLive gave her a platform to open her studio doors, I watched the resulting tutorial more than once.

What Anne Geddes's Studio Teaches Every Working Photographer About Trust, Team, and Baby Lighting

What Anne Geddes's Studio Teaches Every Working Photographer About Trust, Team, and Baby Lighting

There’s a question I get at workshops almost every time: “How do you handle unpredictable subjects?” Usually the person asking is talking about a difficult client or a fidgety model. But the hardest version of that problem is photographing infants, where you have zero verbal communication, a narrow window of cooperation, and something genuinely precious at stake. I’ve shot enough commercial work to know that the gap between a controlled adult portrait session and a session with a six-month-old is not a gap, it’s a canyon.