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 a $10,000 Studio Makeover Winner Teaches Us About Photographing with Purpose

What a $10,000 Studio Makeover Winner Teaches Us About Photographing with Purpose

There’s a version of studio photography that’s entirely about gear lists and modifier specs. I’ve lived in that version for years. I know the watt-second ratings on every strobe in my kit. I label every light with masking tape so I can rebuild a setup from a sketch in under four minutes. But sometimes a tutorial comes along that isn’t really about the technical side at all, and it lands harder than any lighting breakdown I’ve read this year.

How to Pose a Newborn With a Sibling: A Studio Photographer's Breakdown of the CreativeLive Method

How to Pose a Newborn With a Sibling: A Studio Photographer's Breakdown of the CreativeLive Method

Sibling shots are the ones clients always ask for and the ones that go wrong most often. You have a sleepy, floppy newborn, a toddler who has been sitting still for approximately forty-five seconds of their entire life, and a parent hovering just off-frame radiating anxiety. I have watched otherwise solid studio photographers completely lose control of a session the moment a second child enters the frame. The posing logic that works for a solo newborn does not translate automatically, and improvising in the moment with a family watching you is not where you want to figure that out.

Flow Posing Newborns: What Kelly Brown's Technique Teaches Us About Working With the Baby, Not Against It

Flow Posing Newborns: What Kelly Brown's Technique Teaches Us About Working With the Baby, Not Against It

Newborn photography sits in a category of its own. The subjects can’t take direction, they startle at sudden movement, and the margin for error on safety is zero. For most of my career I’ve focused on fashion and beauty work, where the lighting puzzles are technical and the subjects can tell me when something is uncomfortable. Newborns are the opposite on every count. So when I started getting requests from clients who wanted environmental newborn portraits alongside their brand family campaigns, I knew I needed to learn from someone who had built a real system around this work.

From a Spare Room to a Dream Studio: What Kelly Brown's Build-Out Teaches Every Serious Photographer

From a Spare Room to a Dream Studio: What Kelly Brown's Build-Out Teaches Every Serious Photographer

There’s a particular kind of envy I feel when I walk into a studio that someone built entirely on their own terms. Not the petty kind. The motivating kind. I felt it watching this studio tour from The Portrait System, featuring Brisbane-based newborn photographer Kelly Brown of Little Pieces Photography. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube I’ve spent years in rented studios, shooting in spaces designed for someone else’s workflow. The lighting positions were wrong for my preferred setups, the walls were the wrong color, the ceiling height was never quite enough.

How a Newborn Specialist's 1,200 Square Feet Taught Me to Think About Studio Space Differently

How a Newborn Specialist's 1,200 Square Feet Taught Me to Think About Studio Space Differently

There’s a version of studio photography that looks like this: one massive open room, a grid of Profoto heads, maybe a cyclorama wall, and enough space to park a truck. That’s the world I live in most days shooting beauty and fashion in Los Angeles. So when a colleague sent me a studio tour from a completely different corner of this industry, I was skeptical it would teach me anything useful.