The least glamorous variable in newborn photography, and one of the most decisive.
The reason
Newborn sessions involve a baby who is unwrapped, re-wrapped and moved between setups over several hours. A room at ordinary indoor temperature is too cool for that, and a cool baby is an unsettled baby. So the studio runs at around 26–28°C throughout.
It is genuinely uncomfortable for adults. Dress in layers you can take off, and do not wear anything you would mind sitting in a warm room in for three hours.
What else keeps a baby settled
White noise. Running continuously. It masks the small sounds of a working studio — a shutter, a light being moved, a door.
A heated posing surface. So the baby is not placed onto something cold each time, which undoes twenty minutes of settling in about four seconds.
Time. The most important one. Sessions run two to four hours because feeding, settling and waiting take that long. A newborn session compressed into forty-five minutes is a newborn session that will not work.
What we ask of parents
Feed just before you arrive if you can. Bring what you normally use. And accept that the session runs at the baby's pace — if that means an hour of nothing happening in the middle, that is a normal session rather than a failing one.
When to stop
Sometimes a baby simply will not settle. Teething, a cold, or no discernible reason at all. We stop and rebook at no cost, because the alternative is a gallery of a distressed child, and nobody wants that on a wall.