Tips for Styling an Outdoor Holiday Photo Shoot

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Outdoor Holiday Photoshoot

Who doesn’t love a dreamy, holiday baby? You really just can’t get any cuter than this.

Tips for Styling An Outdoor Holiday Photo Shoot

Photographer: @Brittneyjeanphotography – CLICK HERE for her gallery.

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This year – we splurged on the outfit. A little bit, anyways. Now, we didn’t go ALL OUT – I’m still one practical mama – but we did up the price tag slightly in the name of supacute holiday photos. Mister Kaiden is rocking the Nordstrom Baby Organic Cotton Hooded Cardigan & the Stem Drop Jogger Pants.

Last year we did a Carter’s lumberjack onesie for Kaiden’s featured outfit and it came out really adorable. But I’m really loving how the solid prints add to the dreaminess of the photos in combination with the backdrop.

Styling Your Dreamy, Outdoor Holiday Shoot

If you’re going for an outdoor holiday photo shoot in a climate where snow, or even decently cold weather is not an option (aka Southern California – yay!), but you still want the dreamy winter wonderland type feel – I’d recommend solid, light, pastel-ish colors. In fact, in any scenery – pastel colors will work to your advantage. Not only do they accentuate the pure features of your little ones, but pastels also speak of innocence and sweet imagination. Now, I’d like to say we chose the light blue onesie underneath to bring out his eyes as if it were totally planned … but, reality: it was clean.

The jeans on the bottom make matching easy, while not taking away from the color-scheme. The one thing that was a little difficult for us this time around is that, in going with the more upscale clothing we wanted to make sure we got as much wear out of them as possible. This means the clothes looked slightly larger on him than we would’ve preferred for the holiday shoot itself. But the baby face is always the center of attention anyway – so my suggestion for moms shopping for cute but lasting clothes for holiday cards would be to go for the long-term and know your baby is a cutie even in sizes too big. I’ll be sure to follow up with photos of K-man when he grows into these babies in a bit more.

Other Tips for Your Shoot

If you’re going with a professional photographer – make a note that the combination of the late afternoon light (we shot around 3pm) & using warmer hues in the post-production editing helped accentuate the fairy-tale-esque vibe.
Schedule your shoot around nap & feeding times. No one wants a grumpy toddler for the photo sesh.
Bring keys or something loud (that jingles, perhaps?) that you can use to draw your baby’s attention to the camera when it’s time to capture the moment. Kaiden couldn’t be bothered to turn his eyes away from the sticks and grass, unless something *caught* his attention.
Avoid the constant, “Kaiden, Kaiden, Kaiden, look at me, Kaiden,” type of efforts. Just like grown ups, babies will tune out continuous sounds. You’ll want to utilize quick, unexpected bursts of sound to catch baby’s attention for short, intermittent periods of time.
When attention is caught, have an arsenal of strategies ready that you KNOW make baby laugh. Do it over and over while the photographer takes rapid-fire shots.
If you plan on doing family photos in addition to photos with baby – take your standing up/holding baby photos first. If your little one is anything like mine, once he’s on the ground he doesn’t want to be picked up again (this is obviously different with earlier ages that haven’t yet discovered the overwhelming thrill of walking yet).