You are almost due.  Your hospital list is ready and you are packed.  No doubt your camera is right at the top of your bag.  But have you thought about what pictures to take at the hospital?  Most soon-to-be parents believe these important moments will take care of themselves.

But giving birth is a stressful time and emotional time.  Plan ahead or you’ll regret not preparing for these amazing moments and the picture perfect opportunity to capture them as they are happening.  We are counting on them to be baby’s first Lil’Grams after all!  Believe it or not, the hospital is one of the best places to get a great shot of your new baby.  Here’s why, and here are our Top 10 Newborn Photography Tips for the Hospital.

Tip #1.  Pack three or four SIMPLE OUFITS, and a matching hat!

We think single colored, long sleeve onesies are great.  And nothing looks cuter than a newborn in a hat!  If you are going to unbundle your bundle from the expert swaddle job those nurses do, make sure baby is warm!  Otherwise baby will cry.  See point #2.

Your baby will spit or drool, and you won’t want to change your infant right away.  Take a few close-up shots and then wait until you have to change baby’s diaper before trying again.   Having multiple outfits will take the stress out of the situation.

Tip #2. Help Baby Stay Calm – Timing is Everything

A calm baby is a photogenic baby.  Be sure the baby has recently been fed and changed before snapping shots.  The good news is that newborns sleep a lot and tend to sleep through almost anything after they’ve been fed.  It’s amazing!  That’s why photographers can put them in all sorts of positions without waking them up.

Tip #3.  Pose the Baby

Newborns do not pose, and since they will be sleeping so much, you’ll need to make sure you set up the shot.  If they are laying sideways, put hands next to each other.  Put your finger into their little hand and have someone take a picture (close up!).  Cross their little feet over each other and take a shot looking up.  We bet these simple, soft movements won’t wake up the baby!

Tip #4  Lighting is Everything

This is the best reason why most hospitals are a great location for pictures.  Most rooms have HUGE windows which means great natural light.  Roll that bassinet in front of the window, put your back to the light and take some shots.  Make sure you do it at the right angle so that you aren’t blocking the light and creating a shadow on the baby’s face.

Do NOT put the baby against the window with the light behind you unless you know how to use fill flash (flash is BAD, see point #6).  Take pictures at different angles and you’ll get beautiful changes in light that reflect on your angel’s face.

Tip #5  Backdrop is the Other “Everything”

Pack a white or light colored blanket.  If the baby’s outfit is pink, don’t be afraid to use a lighter pink as the backdrop.  It can create a very elegant picture.  Just stay away from bright colors or prints.  Unless you are very good at PhotoShop, correcting these images will be difficult.  Light colors are easier to manage in post-production.

Cover the baby’s bassinet with the blanket whenever you can (take the baby out first, please!).  You’ll want to take random pictures and so will your guests.  Imagine your surprise when grandma gets the perfect shot of baby without even trying!  A busy backdrop or the ugly hospital sign with someone’s bad handwriting will ruin a great close-up.

Tip #6  Avoid the Flash

Natural light will show off that baby skin best.  Flash will throw off the color and accentuate redness.  Avoid it whenever you can.

Tip #7 KISS (Keep it Simple Silly)

Props and toys in photos can be distracting. Clear away clutter.  Your baby’s face is the cutest thing in that room.  Don’t clutter portraits with stuffed animals unless you are doing it for a specific reason.

Tip #8  It’s Digital… So Snap Away

Take at least 5 pictures of a single shot.  This is why professionals always seem to get it right.  Even the slight shift in your baby’s expression can make or break a photo.  Make sure you bring at least 2 extra memory cards for your camera.  They aren’t that expensive anymore and you’ll be upset if you run out of memory.

Tip #9 Put Your Spouse to Work

YOU just had a baby.  If you are usually the shutterbug in the family, make sure you talk to your spouse about his or her new role – as photographer!  If they don’t willingly volunteer use the “labor” card!  That’s right… YOU did all the work, the least he/she can do is take over as family photographer for a few days!

Tip #10  Make a List of Possible Milestones

Even if you discussed the pictures you want to take (see point #9), don’t trust memory.  Make a list of the hospital pictures you are dreaming about.   Here are a few that we’ve seen parents post at Lil’Grams:

Baby’s First Hospital Milestones:

First moment with mom/dad

First moment together (three of you + siblings) as a family

First moment with grandparents

First bath (if hospital allows it)

First time on the scales

First feeding (cover up mom if she’s uncomfortable)

First bottle feeding

First swaddle lesson (yes, there will be more than one)

First pediatrician check up (they come to your room)

- write down the name of the doctor if you are detail oriented

First manicure (most babies are born with really long nails!)

- This is a great time to test the Macro mode of your camera

Try to take a picture of baby with everyone that visits the hospital.  They make great gifts, Lil’Grams and photo books later.

We hope this Top 10 Newborn Photography Tips for the Hospital list makes it into your hospital packing list!  Good luck!  And don’t forget to track your Baby’s Growth in Pictures after you bring them home!

If we missed any milestones please add them.  We will be sharing them with our Lil’Grams parents!

Great baby photography doesn’t have to come from professional baby photographers.  With a little planning, parents can create amazing baby photographs that visually show how fast your baby grows, especially in the first year.  And we all know it happens way too fast!

How To Track Your Baby’s Growth in Pictures

Our favorite Growth Gram comes from Lil’Macy’s Lil’Grams Online Baby Book.  Her parents picked a single point of reference, mom’s favorite giraffe, and used it every month for her “mini baby-birthday” pictures. Using a white large piece of construction paper and a blue marker, they noted the “mini baby-birthday” Macy was celebrating.

Here is a collage of what it could look like after 12 months. It is one of our favorite parent ideas.

Using Pictures to Track Baby's Growth

Tips for Creating Great Baby Photography – Baby Growth Grams!

1. Use your favorite stuffed animal.  Though the effect of an over-sized animal is amazing, you don’t have to go that big.  We recommend that you use a stuffed animal that is at least the size of your baby when he or she was born.  We’ve seen other parents take similar pictures with an animal that is around 21″ and it is really cute to see the baby get significantly bigger than the animal over the first 6 months!  A smaller stuffed animal will also be easier to fit into the picture.  We have also seen other parents take the animal to the hospital, and take baby’s first pictures alongside it.  Too cute!!  Warning: keep this stuffed animal in a safe place.  Baby will be tempted to play with it and you don’t want food stains (or worse!) in your pictures as time passes.
2. Use white paper, not colored paper .  Use a  white large piece of WHITE construction paper and a thick point marker.   You might be tempted to use pink or blue paper, but we highly recommend sticking to white.  You don’t want additional colors competing with what your baby is wearing.  Also, make sure you use the same color marker each month.  We recommend that you buy 2 or 3 of them so that you don’t loose one throughout the years.  TIP: Buy at least 20 of them in case you mess up when  you are writing on it!
3. Consistent Backdrop - use the same backdrop for every picture.  The most important thing avoid is a patterned backdrop.  That will compete with your baby and the stuffed animal.  If your couch does have a pattern, consider putting everyone on a simple, cozy blanket that is light in color.  In this case, you might use a light blue or light pink background, but white is always best.
4. Lighting – you have heard this before – FLASH IS YUCKY!  A FLASH can be your worst enemy, particularly when you are using a light background.  The shadows it creates are annoying and they are very difficult to edit, especially with most free picture editing software.  You will always get the best baby pictures in bright daylight when you don’t need a flash.  We know that isn’t always realistic, so if you are going to use a flash, take the same picture from a few angles  to see which angle minimizes shadows.

Last but not least, your baby doesn’t have to be smiling!  All of your baby’s expressions make great pictures.  So don’t be afraid to show them crying!  If you want people to think your baby is all smiles all the time, then be prepared to do this a few times to get that perfect shot!

If you have a similar project you want to share with our readers, please contact us (hello@lifegrams.com) and we’d love to have you as a guest blogger!  And of course if you are using Lil’Grams,  your family will automagically receive a Growth Gram every time you upload your new pictures!  We just love to make showing off these babies easy!

A quick update to let everyone know that you can now schedule Picasa albums to automatically import based on a keyword. Of course, you can still also import from Flickr or Facebook as well.

For more information on how to use Picasa with Lil’Grams, see our User Guide:
Picasa User Guide

• Facebook/Flickr Users – Automatically import and share your albums as grams – read more at http://bit.ly/9QSGTM #
• We are now integrated with Evernote! Their post: http://bit.ly/91UzTA Our post: http://bit.ly/aZbV2k #

This is a busy week here at Lil’Grams, to say the least. We’ve been hard at working trying to make the lives of our parents simpler and those of their loved ones happier. Today, we’re happy to announce another quick step in that direction.

What’s Evernote?

Evernote is an amazing note taking application that lets you, basically. remember everything. Evernote works from almost every device, from your desktop to your mobile. With more than 3 million happy users already, it’s clearly helping tons of people stay on top of things.

Why Evernote?

When we first met the crew at Evernote, we were quite pleased to hear that one of the original goals for the app was to help parents capture a child’s day to day things. It’s no wonder Evernote makes it super simple to capture photos, audio, notes and more. Apparently, that heritage lives on.

It turns out that tons of parents are using Evernote already. They’re tracking new words, special photos, and lots of other great moments from their baby’s life. Of course, we’re convinced that moments are memories until they’re shared – and sharing’s what we’re awesome at.

How’s It Work?

With Lil’Grams and Evernote, you now have the ultimate memory sharing system. Evernote will let you take notes from you phone, email, the web and more. Lil’Grams will take those notes, beautify them, and instantly share them with your loved ones via email, facebook, twitter and more.

Why Should I Try This?

If you’re not using Evernote already, we definitely think you’ll like the benefits:

• Mobile clients for iphone, android and more
• Background syncing for your notes, photos and more
  
• Rich formatting for your grams – mix text and photos with ease!
  

Learn More

To make sure you get the most out of our Evernote Integration, we’ve launched a new user guide:

Evernote User Guide

Special Offer

We’re so excited about the new integration we’re giving ALL Evernote customers 1 free year. Use the code EVERNOTE.

We’re very excited to announce a new set of features today that we still smile at when we see it in action: Automatic Albums. We’ve spoken with hundreds of parents and they consistently tell us that they love Lil’Grams, though they really love their Flickr and Facebook accounts for storing their photos.

Our mission is to help you be the best memory maker, no matter where your photos are. To that end, your Flickr and Facebook albums will be imported, beautified, and delivered automatically as you create them – just setup your keywords and we’ll do the rest.

Going Automatic

Get Started Now!

Getting started is super simple:

1. Load up your Accounts (preferences > accounts)
2. Setup your keywords (words we should keep track of)
3. We check your account every few hours or so for new matching albums
4. We create new MediaGrams and deliver them to loved ones

Brand New User Guides

As part of this new release, we’ve created 2 new guides to answer all your questions:
Facebook User Guide Flickr User Guide

Update: Automatic importing from Picasa is now live

We’ve been pretty quiet the last couple of weeks as we have been working on a new, very exciting feature for Lil’Grams that we can’t just yet announce. Stay tuned until next week for that news.

In the meantime, we’ve made a couple of small changes worth noting.

Add More Babies!

While we focused on adding in and updating a number of features over the past couple of months, we also moved some out. We’ve had several requests to be able to add more than one baby to your account and that option is now back.

Whenever you add a new baby, your address book is automatically copied over to the new baby’s account.

Preferences Panel

A few of our parents have let us know that they’re taking advantage of our email gram posting. This is great and we hope to see even more of you going this right. One small issue that occurred, though, was that grams weren’t getting sent out to loved ones – our default security setting was that only parents could see a gram.

You can now change your default sharing preferences from within your Baby’s Details page. You’ll also notice some new options which will be coming very soon!

• @dezignated Coffee tomorrow sounds great. We're at the Gladstone for most of the day. in reply to dezignated #
• Wer'e in Toronto visiting until Wednesday, if anyone wants to meet #

• New Feature: Tell Your Story with Full-Length Grams! Find out how – http://bit.ly/dmh2bf #
• RT @daveknox @reuters: Procter & Gamble launches male homemaking tip site http://bit.ly/c4GpzZ #

When we first conceived of Lil’Grams, our first goal was to make sure that busy parents had a way to track all the small details that happened to their little one.  The funny thing about little moments, of course, is that they often have great little stories that go with them.

After a great deal of input and feedback from our parents, we’ve come up with just the solution you’ve been looking for.

With every gram, you can now add in a long or short story to accompany your memory. Stay tuned as we continue to improve this feature.