The Las Vegas Photography Studio

Silva Studios has a private photography studio in Skye Canyon, northwest Las Vegas, used for maternity, newborn and couples sessions. A studio session costs the same as the same session outdoors — $350 for maternity, $350 for couples, $450 for newborn — and includes the same direction on the day, the same professional editing, and the same private gallery of high-resolution images.

It is a small room, and that is deliberate. Seamless paper in cream and neutral tones, controlled lighting, and nothing else in the frame. When people come to the studio it is usually because they want the photographs to be about the people and not about where they were standing.

When the studio is the better choice

Las Vegas is a difficult city to photograph outdoors for about five months of the year. From June through September the only workable outdoor light is the half hour on either end of the day, and in a Las Vegas summer that half hour is still ninety degrees. In December and January the problem reverses: the light is beautiful and there is very little of it, and several of the best locations close their gates before the sun goes down. Red Rock Canyon's Scenic Drive shuts at five from November through February, which is before sunset.

The studio does not have those two problems. The light inside it is the same at eleven in the morning in July as it is at four in the afternoon in January, which means the session gets booked around your week instead of around the weather.

It is also the honest answer when a newborn session needs a controlled space. Most newborn sessions still happen at the family's own home, because a five-day-old should not be packed into a car seat and driven across the valley. But some houses have very little natural light, and a dim living room is the one situation where the drive is worth it.

What a studio session actually looks like

One room, one backdrop, and about an hour. For maternity, that is usually a cream or neutral seamless with directional light, sometimes with flowers, and you will be given full direction the whole way through — nobody is expected to know what to do with their hands.

For newborns the studio is kept warm, around eighty degrees, and the session runs on the baby's schedule rather than the clock. If it pauses for forty minutes because someone is hungry, it pauses.

For couples it is the cleanest possible version of a portrait: two people, a plain background, and nothing else to look at.

What the studio is not for

Family sessions. The room is small enough that a family of four or five does not fit in it comfortably, and pretending otherwise would make for a cramped session and worse photographs. Family sessions are photographed outdoors — there are six locations across the valley with drive times and terrain notes, and Floyd Lamb Park is about ten minutes up the road from the studio if you want the northwest side.

Getting there

Skye Canyon sits on the far northwest edge of Las Vegas, just off US-95, roughly thirty minutes from the Strip and a few minutes from Centennial Hills. The exact address and parking directions are sent when you book. If you are coming from the south or east side of the valley it is a real drive, and it is worth saying plainly: for a newborn session, your own living room is almost always the better answer.