There is a long story about how we started our successful maternity and newborn photography business in Vancouver BC. But here are some memories of our journey to become a baby photographer.
Shortly after we start wrapping a baby for their newborn session we get this question asked: How many kids do you have? And you should see the reaction of our clients when they find out we do not have any babies of our own. Yes, we (Jafar & Nasim – JaNa) do not have any babies but we have been working with them almost every day of our life for more than 8 years.
The second question always is, Why you chose to be a newborn baby and maternity photographer? What was your inspiration? How do you learn all this wrapping technique? Is there anywhere to learn newborn photography?
Well! Let’s start from the beginning. We met each other on top of a high mountain 18 years ago in Tehran. That’s the beginning of our adventurous life together. Not much longer after our wedding night, we promised each other to work hard, save money and explore the world. We wanted to see the people of other countries and get to know them. To find the similarities and our differences. See how others live. How they laugh and cry?
Finally, after lots of ups and downs in 2007, we quit our job as computer programmers, sold all of our belongings, bought two bicycles and started our journey around the world.
It took us two years to pass 15 countries and do a trip around the world by bicycle. We were able to make lots of new friends and convey the message of peace and friendship by planting trees on each stop. We planted 100 trees along the way. They are now great 10 years old witnesses to show the friendship between nations for years to come.
At the end of the journey we were really excited to finally come back home but scary on he other hand as we needed to start a new life from the scratch. After seeing so many countries, cultures and talk with so many people it was time to find a new way to build our own happiness.
It was so hard to go back to the same job. We couldn’t imagine sitting on the computer for 8 hours a day and just do programming. On the other hand, lots have changed. In the programming field, you need to be very up to date and in our case, we were not up to date at all.
Now it was a new life, a new courier with new Jafar & Nasim. During our journey, we financed our trip by taking pictures and running photography exhibitions along the way. It was a grassroots project.
For 2 years we took pictures almost every day from everything. With the focus from landscape to portrait and macro.
It was time for us to make the big change that we wanted for a long time. We always wanted to be to professional photographers but we never found time for that. In fact, we were always afraid of a big change in our courier. So we went to photography school and took so many individual courses from lighting techniques to composition, printing, and photoshop. We also invested on learning fashion, commercial and advertising photography which need extra skills
Making money from photography is so hard when you do not know what do you want to do. For us, wedding photography was a little bit scary and also hard to compete with. We found ourselves ready to be commercial and advertising photographers for products. Working with the light, scene and bringing art to work was exactly what we wanted, but it was not our passion. We wanted to do something that brings meaning to our life.
A passion and a reason to wake us up every day with smiles on our faces and looking for a new day.
We need more changes, something that matches our personality. Working with babies and taking pictures of them, meeting new families, celebrating their happiness. Seeing the happy tear on their faces when they see their photos and appreciating the beauty of a new life was something that we found in Maternity and Newborn photography.
For newborn photography, there were not too many courses and classes compare to other photography fields. Youtube, Facebook, and blogs were almost all we had on hand. We needed to watch the videos and practice to get better at it every day. We offered sessions for our close family members and this is how it officially started for us.
We can never forget the first newborn photography session. It was so hard to calm down the baby and pose her perfectly for the shoot. Finding the best angle of light and props and matching together was a really unknown and kind of a mystery. Once our first session failed we decided to offer it again and redo. The second time we were more experienced and went really better.
That’s when we saw the lights of hope. Its gonna get better day by day. We will be more skilled and more comfortable with doing more sessions.
Now it is almost 8 years that we are doing 2 newborn photography sessions a day. We have photographed more than 3000 new life over these years. We made tons of friends that we laughed with them and celebrated together.
This is how we started our successful maternity and newborn photography business. The love and passion in what we do are taking us the best places. During the years of our professional business, we achieved so many national and international awards as mentors and master photographers in the field. Locally we have also been top 3 newborn and family photography studio in Vancouver and British Columbia. We cant to share more stories with you guys!
please check our business photography Instagram page to see more samples of our work, also visit our personal page to see our adventure life.
We started to make some backstage and tutorial videos to show the other photographers some tricks. Here is some title that we made so far:
Posing newborn babies in a bucket.
Is studio flashlight photography safe for babies and newborns?
