This is my favorite shot out of all the photos I’ve ever taken. It is a shot of my first daughter immediately after being born. I like the image itself because of the high contrast in lighting and the fact that you don’t see the doctor’s head, just his body as necessary to handle the newborn child. Obviously, being my first child, this image has serious sentimental value and evokes a lot of emotion in me. What really gets me about this shot is that I had one split second to capture it and if I had missed it, it would have been gone forever. This shot would have been impossible to re-create. The doctor paused, knowing I had the camera in my hand, asked me if I wanted a quick “posed” shot and then handed her off to the waiting nurses to clean her up. There was certainly no option to say, “Excuse me doctor, could you get the baby back from the nurses and hold her up for me again. I didn’t get a very good shot of her.”

The image quality is lacking compared to today’s standards because this was shot in Nov. ’99 (yes they had digital cameras back then) using a Sony camera that captured 640x480 pixel images and wrote them to a 1.4MB floppy disk that you slid into the camera rather than the 1GB to 32GB tiny SD or CF cards that cameras use today.

Tags: baby, birth, Delivery room, Doctor, umbilical cord