Another chubby baby for the blog: here is a beautiful family I photographed recently in their home - baby Luca was 4 weeks old here, and a lovely cuddly size. She was still young enough to put up with me photographing her asleep in the living room. Her older sister Sam is a total character - I love all her determined 'at play' facial expressions. I'm learning lots from spending time with people who have two children :)

I've photographed Yoel and Nick before - their engagement, and their wedding, so it was lovely to see them again when they let me know that they were expecting a little girl.

We shot the maternity portraits only a couple of weeks before baby Addison arrived (before her due date), and I returned when she was 5 days old to capture her as a tiny new being, so I will blog these photoshoots together.

I'm a recent convert to newborn baby photographs (when I say recent, I should say since Elmer was born!) but now I'm a total sucker for them. I love how you can hold a newborn's whole body in two hands, and how their little hands cling onto yours. I especially love how even though it's hard work, everything seems a little bit magical when there's a new baby in town..

Pretty much the best looking family I know, looking particularly good in this lovely autumn late afternoon light.

Shelley and I arranged this shoot in a slightly last minute fashion, and we only spent about 40 minutes playing in the grass, but got lots of different set ups. Partly of course because 6 month old babies have a 30 second attention span. Rocco is AMAZING though, and spent the entire shoot laughing and smiling, even though he was simultaneously trying to have a poo. Imagine that!

It's so nice to be able to document Shelley and Bailey's new family because I've photographed their engagement shoot, their wedding in 2010, and maternity shots (last winter). Shelley is an amazing photographer in her own right, and you can see her work here. Looking forward to many more happy years being photography nerds together...

We were hoping for a sunny day, and we got one. This was a recent family shoot out on the peninsula, and I arrived early to beat the midday sun. We spent a lovely morning running around under the trees, playing with diggers and hiding dinosaurs.

Often when photographing families I can divide kids into two different types. There's the kind who are shy, and take about half an hour to warm up before they become your best friend (Elmer). Then there's the kind who are best friends with you straight away, no effort required. Sam and Monty (I love the name Monty!) are the latter variety and utterly gorgeous. One of the beauties of being small is that you can dispense with boring small talk, like "Hello", and get straight into the important stuff, "Look how BIG the plants are!"

Since the garden is being dug up for drainage, there were two proper, full size diggers left at the side of the lawn for the weekend. Boy heaven. I think we spent about 80% of the photoshoot in the diggers.

He is squidgy and smiley. And stylish. I photographed baby Jack at home recently with his doting parents, and he was so well behaved and relaxed. He didn't even get grumpy at the end of our shoot when he was tired, he just looked all sleepy and bewildered. So cute!! If this doesn't make you broody, I don't know what will..