How do you prepare your house for a newborn photo session in Las Vegas?

Set your thermostat to about 80°F a full hour before the session, pick the room with the largest window, and open the blinds all the way. In Las Vegas the thermostat is the step people skip, because a house cooled to 74°F on a 94°F September afternoon feels perfectly comfortable to you and is cold enough to wake a nine-day-old out of the deep sleep the entire session depends on. Everything after those three things is optional.

Most of the newborn sessions I photograph happen in the family's own house, and almost every question I get in the days beforehand is some version of "what do we need to do." The honest answer is: much less than you think, and one thing more than you expect. Here is the whole list.

Silva Studios Photography shoots newborn sessions in your home or in the studio, whichever suits the baby, so nothing below is a requirement you have to meet before you can book. It is a list of what helps, not a list of what disqualifies your house.

How warm does the room really need to be?

The room needs to be around 78 to 80°F, which is warmer than any adult wants a room, and that is the point. A newborn is photographed in a thin wrap or nothing at all, and a baby who gets cold wakes up. A baby who wakes up does not curl into the quiet poses people book newborn photos for.

This is where Las Vegas makes the job harder than it is anywhere else. In September we are still averaging highs near 94°F, your air conditioning has been running more or less continuously since May, and the whole house is set somewhere between 72 and 76°F because that is what makes life bearable. That setting is roughly six degrees too cold for a five-day-old lying on a bed in a muslin wrap.

Two practical notes. Turn it up an hour ahead, not when I knock — a valley house with a good AC system takes real time to climb five or six degrees, and starting late means the room is still warming while the session is already happening. And if you would rather not heat 2,000 square feet to 80°F, a small space heater in the one room we are using does the same job for a fraction of the discomfort. Either is fine. Just tell me which, so I know whether to dress for it.

I will be hot. That is expected and it is not your problem to solve.

Which room should you choose?

The one with the biggest window and the palest walls. Not the nursery, unless the nursery happens to be that room — nurseries in this city are frequently the smallest bedroom with the smallest window, and half of them are painted a color that will throw itself across your baby's skin in every frame.

Your primary bedroom usually wins. A bare mattress with a plain white or cream fitted sheet on it is the single best surface in most houses: large, soft, neutral, and right next to the window it needs to be next to.

Then check what direction that window faces, because in Las Vegas that determines what time we shoot more than your schedule does.

Window faces	Best time, September and October	Best time, December through February	What to watch for
East	Early afternoon	Late morning through early afternoon	Hard, direct sun before about 10am
West	Morning, without exception	Morning	Direct sun and real heat from roughly 3pm to sunset — 7:07pm on September 1, 6:25pm by September 30
North	Any bright part of the day	Around midday	The softest light in the house, and usually the least of it
South	Mid-morning or late afternoon	Almost any time	Overhead sun near noon in early fall

The goal is daylight that arrives indirectly, bounced off the sky rather than aimed through the glass. Direct desert sun through a window is not soft light, it is a hard white stripe with a shadow on either side of it, and it heats a room several degrees in twenty minutes.

One more thing that is specific to houses built here: most of them have low-emissivity glass, and plenty have aftermarket tint on top of that. It cuts the light and shifts its color slightly green. It is not a dealbreaker, but it is the reason I would rather have your biggest window than your prettiest one.

What should you have ready before I arrive?

A short pile in the room we are using, so nobody is hunting through the house halfway through:

• A white or cream fitted sheet on a stripped bed, and a second one in case of an accident
• Two extra outfits for the baby, plus whatever you want them photographed in
• More diapers and wipes than seems reasonable, and a few burp cloths
• A pacifier, if you use one, even if you do not usually
• A bottle ready to go if you are bottle feeding at all
• Anything with meaning you want in the photographs — a knit blanket someone made, a hospital bracelet, a name sign

And one thing to turn off: every overhead light and lamp in the room. Household bulbs and daylight are different colors, and mixing them gives skin an uneven cast that is a genuine nuisance to correct. Daylight alone is what makes newborn skin look like newborn skin.

Does the house need to be clean?

No, and I want to be direct about this because people apologize to me constantly. I photograph one corner of one room. The frame is about the size of a bed. Laundry three feet outside it does not exist as far as the camera is concerned.

If you want something to do, clear the nightstand and the floor immediately around the bed. That is the entire list.

The one exception is a Las Vegas exception: wipe the inside of the window glass. Dust builds on windows here faster than it does almost anywhere, and a dusty pane scatters the light coming through it into something flat and hazy. Two minutes with a cloth is the highest-return thing you can do for the photographs, and nobody ever thinks of it.

What about older siblings and the dog?

Bring them into the first twenty minutes, then let them go. Sibling shots work best while a toddler is still interested in the novelty of a stranger with a camera, and they fall apart badly if you save them for the end. Once we have those, a grandparent or a show taking the older one somewhere else is not a failure of the session, it is the plan.

Dogs are welcome if they are calm around the baby. Feed the dog and walk it before I arrive and it will usually sleep through most of it.

How should the baby be fed and settled?

A full feed in the 30 to 45 minutes before we start, with a burp and a diaper change after it, and then we let the milk do its work. A newborn with a full stomach and a warm room sleeps deeply, and that sleep is the whole session.

Plan on about an hour of actual photography, and block off the morning around it. Sessions pause. Babies eat, spit up, need changing, and occasionally need forty minutes of nothing happening at all. That is normal and it is built into how I work — nothing about a newborn responds to being hurried. If you are watching a clock, the photographs show it.

What if your house genuinely cannot do this?

Some can't, and it is worth knowing before the day rather than during it. A small north window in a dark room, a home mid-renovation, or a house full of visiting family are all reasons the studio is the better call, and the session is $450 either way, so there is nothing to weigh financially. There is more on how I decide that in my notes on in-home sessions.

The questions people ask right after this one: Should newborn photos be done in a studio or at home in Las Vegas? and Is newborn photography safe for your baby in Las Vegas?.

If you are not sure which room is your bright one, take a photo of two or three candidates on your phone at mid-morning and send them to me. I can tell in about a minute, and it saves us both from finding out on the day. You can reach me at (725) 400-4388, or read through the newborn session details first if you would rather. Silva Studios Photography covers the whole Las Vegas valley for in-home newborn work, and if your windows turn out to be the problem, the studio is the same $450.