Newborn Photographer in Roseville, CA

Roseville is a railroad town that outgrew the description, and Jesica has a real soft spot for it. A Central Pacific crew came east across the plain from Sacramento in 1864 and crossed the little line running between Lincoln and Folsom; they called the crossing Junction, and that is all it was for forty years. Southern Pacific moved its yard up from Rocklin in 1906, the town incorporated in 1909, and Junction became Roseville.

The grid still shows it, which is part of the charm. O.D. Lambard laid the blocks either side of the track in 1864 and named only five streets — Pacific, Atlantic, Washington, Lincoln and Vernon — and Vernon is the one the town still turns around. Old Town sits where the yard put it, and the Town Square that opened there in 2013 gave the middle of Roseville somewhere to actually gather. It is a genuinely warm downtown, and a good deal more characterful than a town its size has any right to be.

Newborn sessions come to the Lodi studio rather than to Roseville homes, and the reason is plain once you have carried a newborn through it: the room has to sit at eighty degrees, every wrap and prop within arm's reach, and nobody ringing the doorbell. That is a room, not a bag. An hour each way buys a session that does not depend on the weather, the thermostat or the neighbours.

Jesica is up this way often, and Roseville families are some of her favourites to photograph — far enough from the valley floor to feel like a change of scene, close enough that the drive is genuinely easy. Newborn dates are held loosely against the due date rather than pinned to a morning, so the trip is made once, on a day chosen when the baby is ready. Most Roseville families make an outing of it: the session, an early lunch in Lodi, and home before the afternoon goes sideways.