Should you bring your baby to a photo shoot (Spoiler, no)?

We recently did a photo shoot for the relaunch of our sandal brand, fibi & clo. At its height, fibi & clo was an extremely popular sandal brand in the South and California. People up North enjoyed them as well, but just didn’t have as much opportunity to wear them like their neighbors down South. 

Due to a much longer story that I won’t go into here, I took a couple years off to pursue my other passion, technology. Well, the brand is back, and due to another much longer story that I won’t go into here, it has the backing of a team of industry insiders and professionals that can help us rebuild the brand to be better than it ever was.

I called in some favors, and assembled a talented group of friends that would normally cost way more than our budget, but thankfully they believe in the brand as much as we do, and donated their heart, talent and time. We are blessed and grateful. 

The first time we did a shoot like this, my wife and I were not yet engaged, and after we were finished we went out with the crew and had a lot of drinks and fatty foods. This time around we are a newly minted family of three, and the drinking part would be decidedly left out (and the wrap party consisted of BBQ and a movie).

We hired a babysitter, but we faced the decision - bring baby and sitter to the shoot or leave them at home. When Karina was born, I wanted her to experience the most that life has to offer. This is one of the reasons I resigned from my high-paying tech job. It sounds counter-intuitive, but while you may be less stable, work longer hours, and have less money, when being an entrepreneur, you can do it from anywhere and I find I get to spend more time with my child, and she gets to be more involved with the business I’m building (in fact she’s crawling all over me while I write this, so please forgive any typos from her banging on the keybodfsakjfd93ard). 

With that in mind I decided to bring her to the shoot. I wanted her to see her mommy (the designer and creative director), and daddy (assistant to mommy for the shoot), in action.

Well, this was a mistake. The weather was perfect, and Karina slept most of the time, but every time she got fussy and cried, and even though she was tended to by our babysitter, Mommy could still hear the cries and would walk away to go tend to her. I think a better course of action would have been to have the sitter stay at home, and come visit the set a couple times throughout the day, satisfying my need to have Karina experience a shoot, and allowing mommy to concentrate on the task at hand. 

Photo shoots are about controlling your environment as much as possible, and during an outdoor shoot these variables exponentially grow. A baby is one that you do not need (or maybe just in small doses).