Pittsburgh In-Home Lifestyle Newborn Photography | Baby Charlie

There is something about in-home newborn lifestyle sessions that speaks so deeply to me. I’m only a year removed from those first few days at home with my own son, and each time I walk into a home to meet a brand new baby, and his or her brand new mama and daddy, I am transported back. I remember the excitement, the exhaustion, the adrenaline. I remember the wrinkly little toes and squeaky whimpers. I remember feeling on top of the world, and simultaneously buried in doubt. But I also remember the sweetness. The collective intake of breath, in the quiet moment in the morning wondering “what now?” The fumbling and figuring it out together, as a brand new family, relying on each other in ways you never had to before.

Baby E | In-Home Pittsburgh Newborn

In the story of your life, bringing home baby is the ultimate plot twist.

The pages are fast, and fierce, and slow, and gentle. They are sweet and bitter, empowering and humiliating. The best of times, and the worst of times.

Rachel RossettiMarch 20, 2019Comment

5 Lessons I Learned From Having My Own Family Photographed

This past fall, I decided do something I had been meaning to do for the past half year: get family photos taken of our new family of three. Sure, I’m a professional photographer, but you’ve heard the one about the shoemaker’s kids, right? I have a million pictures of my son, my husband, and things I’ve eaten recently. I, like pretty much every mom I know, am never in the pictures.

I don’t like to have my picture taken. But...I desperately wanted to be in the pictures. Since becoming a mom, I’ve witnessed how babies change in a blink, and how overnight they seem to wake up and leave little pieces of their babyhood behind. And if I didn’t step in front of the camera with him to capture a few of those moments, right then and there, they’d be gone and I would regret it forever.

Rachel RossettiJanuary 23, 2019Lifestyle photography, Family, PersonalComment

Baby B | Shadyside Lifestyle Newborn

Because the moon? It’s far. It’s very, very far. It’s impossibly far away. And impossibly far is precisely the length moms (and dads!) go to to bring new life into this world, and to raise them in love. For sweet little Baby B, no one will go farther for him than his amazing mama and daddy.

Beth and Pat know that loving someone to the moon and back is a lifetime’s worth of love. A lifetime of right and wrong turns, bumps and bruises, exploration, discovery and joy. What a privilege and a joy it was for me to step into their home and witness some of the very first steps of that new journey as a family of three.

Rachel RossettiJanuary 19, 2019Comment

Baby L | Pittsburgh Lifestyle Newborn

It’s a gift to document people on the best days of their lives— and to see how their definition of “best” grows and evolves over time.

Best doesn’t necessarily mean their most glamorous; although it can. Asia and Drew’s wedding day was pretty spectacular, after all. Asia was one of the most beautiful brides I’ve ever seen (and Drew, one of the most handsome grooms, of course!). It was an amazing day filled with the joyous celebration of friends and family.

But not every best day comes with the pomp and fanfare of ball gowns and bow ties. Sometimes, the very BEST days, are the most subdued. They are intimate, fragile. Precious.

Rachel RossettiDecember 6, 2018Comment