Baby & Toddler Photography in Dallas–Fort Worth

Toddlers do not hold a pose, and I stopped asking them to. I'm BK Bennett, I live in Greenville, and I photograph babies and toddlers all over Dallas–Fort Worth, mostly outdoors and mostly while they are busy with something else. Once a kid can sit up on their own, grab at whatever is in reach, and cross a yard under their own power, the job changes. So I hand them something real to do and stay out of the way, and I keep shooting through the parts that look like chaos, because the frame you end up putting on the wall is almost never the one where everybody was looking at me.

The gallery below is farm country, which is where this age looks best. A little boy in striped overalls holds a fresh egg inside a chicken coop, with hard light coming through the corrugated walls behind him. Bare baby feet hang off the back of a red wooden wagon. A red toy tractor sits in the grass under a cedar tree with the sun bursting through the branches, and another boy sits in golden grass eating an apple with a teddy bear propped beside him. A girl in a denim romper smells a bunch of baby's breath on a bench in a wheat field, and another holds a baby chick with an Australian shepherd leaned up against her in the prairie grass. There is a plaid rag doll getting hugged in tall grass, and a gray rabbit being petted about as gently as a toddler can manage.

Animals and props earn their keep at this age. A kid who is occupied with a chicken or a wagon wheel forgets the camera is there, and that is usually when their face does something worth keeping. Bring the toy they are attached to this month, the blanket they will not part with, snacks, and a second set of clothes, because something is going to get spilled or stepped in. We also pick a window that does not fight a nap. A rested one-year-old and an overtired one are two different children, and only one of them wants to be outside with a stranger holding a camera. Older brothers and sisters are welcome in the frame and are usually the reason a baby finally laughs.

I shoot across the metroplex and the towns ringing it, out through Rockwall and Greenville and the farm roads past them, and if your own place has a pasture or a yard with decent light we can start right there. Spring and fall are the easy stretches, when the grass is green or gone gold and the heat is not deciding how long we get. Summer still works in the last hour before the sun drops. Winter is bare and quiet, and some families prefer it that way. If you have a newborn on the way instead, those sessions are listed on the services page. Otherwise tell me roughly how old they are and when you are hoping to shoot, and I will tell you what the light is doing that time of year.