The NILMDTS mission involves photographing babies who will never have the opportunity to have professional photography. Therefore, we provide remembrance photography to those babies who were stillborn, have died in the early days after birth, have never left the hospital, or are being sent home to hospice. Sometimes, we receive requests from families who are outside our standard mission. In such cases, we don’t decline if services are requested, but if these families don’t request our services, we recommend that you offer them other services that are often available and more appropriate for older children.
If you’ve already offered our services, then by all means, please send the photos for us to retouch. We would never want to have anyone tell them that we cannot or will not retouch their child’s photos. But our services shouldn’t be offered in situations that fall outside our standard mission outlined on our website unless the family specifically requests the services on their own in order to prevent burnout and compassion fatigue.
We encourage you to reach out to your facility’s social worker or local hospice facilities in your area to see if they might have some knowledge of volunteers who provide end-of-life portraits. If that fails, you may find local organizations that specialize in photography for diverse circumstances by searching “photography non-profit near me.”
