My baby photography club offers you three photo shoots in your baby’s first year.  For the sake of ease of communicating the package details, I say that these are at four, eight and twelve months old.
That’s not entirely accurate though and here’s why. For your first session, your baby is going to be very limited in what they can achieve from a physical point of view – that’s not a criticism, just a fact of four month old life!
Of course, all babies develop at different rate and I have occasionally had four month olds that can sit up by themselves, but most of them are still pretty flopsy when it comes to sitting without at least a little bit of support.  I do have a special posing cushion that supports them while they are on my beanbag and allows them to ‘sit up’ so we can and will use that.  Our second option is to take pictures of them as they lie down on their backs.
However, and this is the part where timing of your first baby photography club session comes into it, I think it’s really nice to have a third posing option in your finished image gallery. This is when your baby is on their tummy. For this reason, I recommend waiting to book your first Joe Club session until your baby can lift their head while they are having some tummy time.
They only need to be able to do for a short period of time and we do have a choice of ‘ramps’ I can give them to offer them a helping hand but my advice would be to wait until they can look up at your pretty consistently.
This will give you a lot more variety in your finished images and it’s a lovely set of shots to have in your finished gallery. You are also more likely to be able to get those cute ‘happy baby pose’ photos if you wait that little extra time for your baby to discover their feet while they are lying on their back.
Like I say, all babies develop at different rates – some babies will be doing all of this at three months and some will get to it a little later.  The four month age suggestion for your first baby photography club photo shoot is just a guide – hit the ‘tummy time confidence’ development stage for the widest range of images from your session.