Nicole Hawkins Photography

View Original

Northern New Jersey Child Photographer | Welcome to Essex County

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. 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, New Yorkers, please know that I will always travel to my beloved New York City to photographer families in their homes and outdoors in the beautiful parks. Yes, I will keep the UWS photography studio, but I will be offering a limited number of monthly sessions, which will always go first to my Membership clients and VIP clients (graduates of my Portrait Membership). See you soon, NYC!

Disclaimer: our children diligently wear masks in all public places. I believe in documenting what it was really like (lots of masked photos!), but also preserving the joyful feelings and soulful looks of childhood, so if our family are the only people nearby I sometimes temporarily allow them to remove their masks for a portrait.

And now, I present, two children set free in New Jersey (August 2020 - December 2020):