My Why

Well hello there, my name is Blair Waite, and I am the owner of Beauty by Blair Boutique Photography. I have always been artistic and showed an interest in photography very young. My mother was a self-employed photographer and allowed me to begin assisting her when I was quite young. I first started working with newborns in 2005 when I got a job with Essence Photography photographing babies in the hospital shortly after birth. I just LOVED my job, I got to hold teeny tiny babies every single day, but I didn’t truly discover my passion for newborn photography until I had my own child.

My daughter was born 6 weeks premature and spent the first couple weeks of her life in the Kaiser and Children’s Hospital NICU’s. I stayed at the hospital with her but was only allowed to hold her for 30 minutes every 3 hours. Once she was released, she was bruised heavily all over her body from the various IVs and such. She was this fragile little thing and I felt so grateful to finally get to hold her without all of the tubes, monitors, and IV’s hooked up to her. With all of that going on, pictures just didn’t seem like a priority. I finally took some shots of her once she was almost 2 months old. After her first year of life, she was this rambunctious, brave, independent, headstrong little girl and those days of fragility seemed so far away. I look back at all of the photos from that first year and realize one very sad fact.

There are hardly any pictures of me with her, especially when she was a newborn.

I was always the one behind the camera so there are tons of pictures of her with her dad, but few with me. When I would hold her in the NICU, I would tuck her little booty into my sports bra and her head would barely reach my collar bone. I don’t really have any photos that show how incredibly tiny she was (3 lbs 10 oz).

It is my mission now to document this incredibly precious (and FLEETING) time. I want parents to have a keepsake they can treasure the rest of their lives. Our babies are going to grow so incredibly fast, if we don’t document them as we go, we may forget those incredible little details that change. Those knuckle dimples, the shoulder hair, stork bites, strawberries, etc. When our daughter was born, the cartilage in her left ear hadn’t quite developed yet so her left hear was flat and floppy. It was the cutest, funniest thing and we don’t really have any pictures that show it. Don’t make the mistake I made, make it happen. You will never get this chance again.

“Nothing haunts us like the family portraits we didn’t take”- Unknown

Birth