Northern New Jersey Child Photographer | Welcome to Essex County
2026 Update: This post was originally written when my family first moved from New York City to Maplewood, NJ in August 2020 (yes, a pandemic move). Since then, Nicole Hawkins Photography has grown into a full-service portrait studio located in Maplewood, serving families throughout Essex County and Northern New Jersey. It’s been an amazing journey and we love SOMA and living in New Jersey more than we could have ever dreamed.
If you’re looking for current portrait information, I now offer maternity, newborn, baby milestone, child portraits, family photography, and headshots in my Maplewood studio, along with select in-home and outdoor sessions.
It’s official: I am now a Northern New Jersey child photographer! This summer we moved our home base to Maplewood, NJ and plans are in the works for an Essex County portrait studio for newborns, babies, children and their families (which has since become my Maplewood portrait studio). I absolutely cannot wait to create gorgeous baby and child portraits in the NJ photography studio.
So, from here on out, my heart will be in New Jersey, where my kids are running wild. (The space to run wild was the primary reason we moved to Essex County, and the kids are gleefully taking advantage of it.) Since I am now a NJ family photographer, I’d love to share some of my favorite family images from our first few months as a Maplewood family.
I’d like to note that I absolutely adore New York City with all my heart. My husband grew up in Manhattan, my parents are from the Bronx, my husband and I met at law school in Queens, our first home together was in Brooklyn (at this rate there must be a second cousin in Staten Island, right?). I gave birth to my daughter on the UWS and Ted and I loved raising both kids there for four years. Grandma still lives on the UWS and it will always feel like home to us. We spent the peak of the pandemic’s first wave in our two bedroom apartment on the UWS and essentially didn’t leave until we moved to Essex County New Jersey in late August. I have hundreds of photos from that intense time period, which I plan to put into an album for our family, and I’d love to narrow it down further for a blog post showing you all what came before these happy Maplewood family photos. In the meantime, I will be offering a limited number of NYC photoshoots, which will always go first to my long standing clients, like families who hired me for NYC newborn photography and joined my Baby’s First Year Portrait Membership. See you soon, NYC!
And now, I present, two children set free in New Jersey (August 2020 - December 2020):
