Congratulations! So you’re going to be a dad (perhaps again?) The birth of your child is a momentous event, one that, as far as I’m aware, only happens once per kid. You’re going to want to capture the memories in photos for your child, of course, and for family and friends. But most of all, you and Mom will need this because the sleep deprivation will leave your memories pretty foggy years later.
You need a good camera.
But not just any camera. Documenting the birth and first days of your child is a very specific use case for a camera and you can’t just go by generic camera buyer’s guides in deciding what to bring for the big day. When my father and I used to work on projects around the house, he used to stress the importance of picking the right tool for the job. I still firmly believe this, especially in photography.
Here are the most important factors in selecting the best camera for your new baby’s arrival.
Budget
Of course, your budget will be a deciding factor. Kids –or more accurately, the things they need– aren’t inexpensive and you don’t want to blow all your cash on a camera. That said, these are possibly the most important photos you will ever take so don’t cheap out and just bring your smartphone, even if it’s top-of-the-line. (Do bring the smartphone, mind you, as a backup and as a user-friendly camera you can hand to anyone else offering to snap a family picture that includes you.)
Keep in mind that you’ll want to keep right on taking pictures of your child as she or he grows up, so if capturing quality images is important to you, a quality camera is a helpful purchase. Plan to spend anywhere between CAD $500 and $1,800, depending on whether you’re buying used or new. You could spend more than that, but for our purposes, I’m assuming you aren’t already a photography geek at this point so going all-out for a pro-level camera is going to be overkill.
Startup Time
This is the main reason why you don’t want to rely entirely on your smartphone, daddy-o. A lot of what’s going to happen will happen fast and you will miss some very important moments if you’re fiddling about with a touch screen and waiting for the camera app to launch. Keep in mind that you are not just there to take pictures, so the camera won’t be on and ready all the time.
Further, consider the time it takes to:
Realize you’re seeing a photo-worthy moment
Start up the camera and achieve shutter responsiveness
Frame the shot
Make sure the right thing(s) is/are in focus
Capture the shot
Split seconds count in capturing special moments. Your skills and reflexes will be the limiting factor for items 1, 3, and to some extent, 4 and 5 so you want item 2 to be as lightning-quick as technology allows. Modern mirrorless and D-SLR cameras have really fast startup and have an accessible on/off switch that let you power the camera on by feel as you’re raising it to frame the shot. Most smartphones and point-and-shoots simply won’t make the cut.
Fast / Large Aperture Lens
If you’re already an experienced shutterbug, you know that a large lens aperture (a.k.a. a low F-stop number) is what you want in low light conditions. (You want to avoid using a flash or bringing your own lights so this project is pretty much all natural/available light.) It’s also a key creative control that lets you blur items in the frame that aren’t your subject.
The vast majority of human births happen indoors, so you’ll want a fast lens for both of those reasons for sure. Lighting in hospitals, in particular is pretty variable and you have little to no control over it. For most shots you can count on there being suboptimal illumination that would force your camera to require a slow shutter speed (risking motion-blurred shots) and/or a high ISO setting (resulting in possibly noisy / grainy images.) The third point of the exposure triangle is the amount of light your lens allows in, so try to maximize this capability.
When you’re taking photos of your sleeping baby, you’ll also appreciate the softer look you can achieve in your closeup shots at larger aperture / lower F-stop settings.
In terms of hard specifications, you’ll want at a lens that can open to an F2.8 or wider aperture.
Lens Focal Length
The arrival of a child is an intimate experience that tends to take place in a close setting. As the father / birth partner, you will be able to (and want to) get in close for almost everything so you really don’t need a long focal length. In fact, you’ll probably want to err on the wider-angle side because there will be scenes from which you can’t physically distance yourself sufficiently to completely capture in your frame. In 35mm / full-frame equivalent terms, you’ll want a lens in the 24-50mm range . That’s 16-35mm if your camera has an APS-C sized sensor.
You might be tempted to get a zoom lens for more flexibility in the future but for this particular life event, I would highly recommend a prime (non-zooming) lens with a focal length of 35mm (for full-frame sensors) or 23mm (APS-C sensors) for the following reasons:
It’s wide enough to capture most scenes at close quarters but not so wide that you’ll see crazy nose-enlarging distortion when taking photos up close.
A prime lens will be much lighter, more compact and less expensive than its zoom equivalent in the sub-F2.8 aperture range that you need.
Taken with FujiFilm X-T3 with 35mm F2 lens (50mm equivalent on full-frame sensors).
Taken with FujiFilm X100F, 23mm focal length (equivalent to 35mm on full-frame sensors.)
Taken with FujiFilm X-T3 and 14mm F2.8 lens (21mm equivalent on full-frame sensors). Within the tight confines of the delivery OR, an ultrawide angle lens was necessary to get this shot. That said, I wouldn’t recommend bringing as many cameras as I did into the operating room. I had to keep the X-T3 bag with me because there was no safe place to leave it unattended. Of course, I figured since I had it, I might as well use it with a lens that was significantly different from the 23mm on the X100F to get some interesting shots.
Sensor Size
The camera’s sensor is the part that converts the light from a scene into electrical signals that ultimately get stored to your memory card. Larger sensors generally go hand-in-hand with better image quality, meaning more sharpness, more dynamic range, less noise, etc. They also allow for a shallower depth of field in conjunction with a low F-stop aperture. Shallow depth of field means more blurring of out-of-focus distances. Again, this criterion rules out smartphones and most point-and-shoot cameras. In terms of common specifications, micro four-thirds formats are OK, APS-C is better and full-frame (35mm equivalent) is great. Anything larger than this is ridiculous overkill and results in a larger / more expensive camera than you want for this job.
Silent Shutter
In the process leading up to the delivery, you’ll have an opportunity to take candid photos of Mom’s experience of labour and there will be other people (nurses, doula, midwife, etc.) coming and going. You don’t want to be too obvious or distracting as you document the event. You are also going to want to get in really close to photograph your sleeping little one after he/she is born. (Seriously, the sheer cuteness of this is impossible to resist.) The last thing you want to do is wake him/her with a big shutter curtain and/or mirror clacking noisily when you snap the first photo.
With most D-SLR cameras, you can enable a silent electronic shutter mode but this requires first locking the mirror in the up position, which does make a sound. It also blocks your optical viewfinder, so you’ll have to use the rear screen for composing your shot. By contrast, mirrorless cameras, by definition, don’t have this issue, particularly if you have a model with a viewfinder so you can shoot with either the rear screen or with your eye to the camera. As is the case with D-SLRs, though, you will need to enable the electronic shutter and disable any shutter sound effects for completely silent operation.
The downside of electronic shutters is that some weirdness may happen under fluorescent lighting and other light sources that pulse at certain shutter speeds. At the slower shutter speeds necessary in the dimmer lighting conditions you’re likely to experience, this probably won’t be an issue but it’s good to be aware of the pros and cons.
In my opinion, the ideal option for this photography job –note that this will significantly narrow down the field of camera choices– is a leaf shutter. This is a type of mechanical shutter so banding from pulsing light sources won’t ever be a problem. Best of all, leaf shutters operate nearly silently (just a barely audible ‘tick’) so use the default shutter setting and you’re good to go. Leaf shutters do limit the aperture at very fast shutter speeds but you’re unlikely to encounter conditions that allow the fast shutter speeds that would bring the limitations into play. The FujiFilm X100-series or a Ricoh GR-series are the options I’m aware of currently that also meet the other criteria.
Autofocus
Most cameras let you focus manually, of course, but I wouldn’t recommend this unless you are very practiced at it. The big aperture and shallow depth of field that are likely to be the main order of business during your child’s first hours mean that your camera needs to be able to find focus quickly and often. If your subject (your subject’s eyes, specifically, when photographing someone’s face) is close to the camera and not in perfect focus, this will ruin your shot.
Autofocus performance in low light tends to suffer and you want to avoid using the camera’s focus-assist light because that’s distracting. So you’ll want to choose a camera/lens combo that is well-reviewed for speed and its ability to lock on focus in darker settings.
As a general rule, for autofocus as opposed to other capabilities, the newness of your camera makes a big difference so if you’re deciding between new and used, this may be what tips the balance.
Compact Size
Remember, you won’t be –nor do you want to be– holding the camera the whole time. So you don’t want a big, honkin’ five-pound beast of a pro D-SLR hanging off your chest when you get your first chance to hold your little angel. Also, a hospital delivery room is full of carts, IV lines and medical equipment (not to mention medical professionals) that you don’t want to catch with your lens as you’re squeezing into position for your various non-photographic responsibilities.
There will also be moments when you want to hold your partner’s hand, or to otherwise help out, so a smaller, lighter camera has a better chance of being properly held and operated with one hand.
Dynamic Range
This is your camera’s ability to capture detail in a scene that has both very bright areas and very dark areas. The camera’s auto-exposure program will do its best to preserve the detail in all of the shadows and highlights of the image but some situations will cause highlights to be blown, or for detail in shadows to become too noisy to boost later on your computer. Medical procedure lights or sunlight coming through a window are bright enough to cause such situations. Newer smartphones, which I still do not recommend as your main camera for the day of your child’s arrival, use computational methods to expand dynamic range automatically so if you’re used to shooting with one of these, be prepared to lower your expectations with a “real” camera, at least at the time of this writing. That said, you’ll be shooting in “raw” mode with the real camera, which will offer very good post-processing options. More on this later.
As a rule of thumb, newer cameras and/or those with larger sensors tend to offer superior dynamic range, all other factors being equal.
So What’s Ideal?
Camera choice is a topic of passionate debate amongst enthusiasts so take my opinion for what it’s worth. Based on my most recent experience, I was very, very happy to have a FujiFilm X100F with me as I welcomed my daughter into the world. It hits all of the above points in a manner that’s about as optimal as I believe is available on the market (the newer X100V is likely even better). Ultimately, it’s about the moments it allowed me to capture in a way that was most forgiving of my limitations. Because I happen to be a nerd who takes photography pretty seriously, I also had a more expensive and versatile (but larger) FujiFilm X-T3 with me, along with a complement of lenses. Both are APS-C sensor cameras.
In hindsight, though, I would have been just fine, probably even better off, with just the X100F, and my iPhone 11 Pro as a backup. This is mainly because it would have been less gear to pack and to keep track of as we moved through the hospital.
Other Gear
Besides the camera itself, you’ll need a small bag big enough to hold the camera (which will have its memory card and battery installed), a spare battery, a spare memory card, some lens wipes, a lens pen, a lens hood, a battery charger (or USB cable if your camera can charge batteries without removing them) and a memory card reader you can connect to your smartphone or iPad. You may also want to bring a small tripod like a Joby Gorillapod.
That’s All for Gear But…
The camera is just one small part of the overall picture (pardon the pun.) Please see my other posts to learn everything a dad needs to know about photographing the arrival of his new baby.