How to Get a Newborn Shot with Black Background Part 2

I mentioned a few "what NOT to do's" in the previous post when taking pictures of a newborn on a black background. Let me illustrate them.

So to recap, when you are taking photos of a newborn on a black background you want your assistant to wear black and/or cover every part of them that is not black with a black cloth so that when you look through the viewfinder of your camera you see black immediately around every part of the newborn.  So in the photo below you see two places where that didn't occur (by the head and by the foot).  You can still Photoshop this out, but it's just so much faster and easier if you don't have to and look for this problem before shooting the picture.

The second major problem is to make sure you don't cover anything that shouldn't be covered. So also in the photo below you see part of the ball covered and part of the baby's leg covered. 

 Here's another example.  The assistant was holding the baby's shoulders and neck. Unfortunately he was covering the shoulders with the black cloth in attempt to hide his hands.

What would have been an adorable photo if the shoulders were there, turned out like this after post production...very unnatural looking.

Now I'll demonstrate how to get another fun pose, again with the black background technique used in the previous post.

Have you assistant sit cross legged on the floor. Sit the baby on your assistant's leg, one hand supporting the neck, the other on the back. 

As you can see in the photo there is black all around the baby which is good, but unfortunately part of the black cloth covered the ball, so that required a bit more Photoshop work for me.

Using the technique in the previous post, burn out the background. It should look something like this.

Then you just rotate the image, make it black and white, bring the color back into the ball, etc. Do whatever you want until you like the way it looks.