Ethereal Birth Photography - Client Consent

Both mothers consented to images with their faces being shared online, but wish to keep baby’s face private. We can censor images with shapes, text boxes, blurring, and sometimes crop faces out.

In this birth photo, a midwife listens to baby's Fetal Heart Tones with a doppler, before, during, and after a contraction to make sure baby is doing well.

Midwife Angie measures fetal heart tones using a doppler to chart heart rate trends through labor.

Images like this can be great promotional images for midwives, doulas, lactation consultants, or other Birth Professionals that you’ve chosen based on their social media presence.

In this birth photo, a midwife holds up a placenta to show the mother that it was shaped like a heart. After birth, midwives closely examine the placenta to make sure all pieces of it are accounted for, to reduce the risk of hemorrhage and infection.

This placenta is heart shaped! I find these images fascinating, but they may be disturbing for someone who has a phobia of blood.

Other images from this birth include large clots from a postpartum hemorrhage, drops and smears of blood across her body, meconium on her baby’s bottom, and the sidelines birth video shows a midwife administering a shot of pitocin into her thigh to control bleeding.

If you have phobias with blood, needles, tissue, feces, chunks of vernix, etc, please tell me! Let me know if you would like for it to be edited in black and white only, or not included at all in your final album.

In this birth photo, a midwife gently gives percussive thumps with the heel of her hand to encourage baby to spit up aspirated blood and amniotic fluid from birth.

Midwife Seasons gently gives percussive thumps up baby’s back, upward toward the head, to encourage baby to cough up any fluid in his lungs. In other images taken at this time, we can see him “walking” or flexing one leg at a time, showing he has muscle tone and newborn reflexes - a good indicator that he’s actually doing okay!

Metadata of a later image showed that supplemental breaths with a bag-valve-mask were administered at 16 minutes postpartum to help increase his oxygen levels. The images and metadata can be helpful for recalling APGAR scores at 1, 5, and 10 minutes after birth for their birth certificate, and charting interventions in your medical records.

These moments may seem distressing, but the midwife’s calm demeanor is reassuring. If your birth ends up feeling a bit traumatic, reviewing these images with me or your providers may bring you comfort, as we explain how common it is for babies to need a little help in those first minutes of extrauterine life, pointing out other details that may soothe anxious memories.

A doula gives counter pressure by pressing against mother's spine between her hip bones.

This birth client’s doula was her mother. Though mom and doula’s faces are not in frame, mom’s spine tattoo that says “everything happens for a reason,” and doula’s manicured hand (if perhaps she was wearing a distinctive ring), could be identifying enough for someone who knows them to figure out who they are.

If you need to keep your birth a secret from a toxic family member or a stalker, I wouldn’t share images like this online.

This client sent images with examples of birth photography to demonstrate just how much nudity they’re comfortable sharing online. As a photographer, this is EXTREMELY helpful for us to be able to visualize your preferences!

The first image is a side view of the moment baby’s head was fully outside of the vagina, but the shoulders had not yet come out. The side profile angle does not reveal mom’s vulva or anus, as they’re hidden behind her thigh.

The second and third images show mom’s chest, and her fully exposed and uncensored nipples, as she waited for baby to latch. We can obstruct your nipple/areola with something like an emoji heart, a text box, and try to crop or blur it in lightroom and photoshop.

Note that in the third image, the photo was cropped in a way that the upper pubic area is included, but it does not reveal her labia, clitoris, etc - which was likely in frame in the unedited photo.