Your new baby is beautiful – but you haven't gotten a good picture yet? Take heart! Here are 10 tips from the pros that are guaranteed to make your baby's album shine.

Whether you're photographing a baby or a grandparent, one of the biggest mistakes amateur photographers make is that they don't use natural light, says Kevin Gilbert, a 20-year veteran and managing partner of Blue Pixel, one of the United States' leading digital imaging consulting teams. "The flash makes everything appear very flat, and it's not a very appealing, flattering light to photograph anyone – especially a baby," he says. "A baby is soft and round, and when you use a flash, all that depth that your eye sees, all the subtle nuances of how the light is hitting your baby, it all just goes away."

If you aren't using the flash, you need to get your baby into some light that will produce beautiful pictures, says Nick Kelsh, Olympus Visionary photographer and author of How to Photograph Your Baby (Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1999). To start, try moving your sleeping baby's Moses basket or bassinet over by a window. "You don't want harsh direct light but soft light that's coming in from one side," Kelsh says. "That's basically the light that Rembrandt built a career around – that beautiful, dramatic, soft light."

"Amateur photographers generally don't get close enough to their subjects," Kelsh says. "This is especially important with babies because their skin is so perfect." And the new digital cameras, even the cheapest ones, will allow you to get in and focus really close on all those precious little wrinkles and folds.

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