Caption for ptb150615.jpg: Professional portraits of newborns, like this one by Stephanie Cotta, are increasingly popular -- and can be costly.

Add another item to the pregnancy checklist: Book the glamour shots for your newborn.

It only makes sense for a generation used to displaying their curated and polished life milestones.

You've seen this pictorial story on Facebook: First comes the newly engaged couple sitting in a tree. Then comes the art-directed wedding. Then comes the baby posed in a baby sling.

There may also be professional pregnancy photos and a gender reveal along the way. But the Anne Geddes poster-worthy baby -- that's the money shot.

St. Louis-based newborn photographer Stephanie Cotta says she was one of the first to bring the idea of "newborn art" to the city back in 2010, soon after the birth of her first child. She has perfected a series of 17 poses she only uses on babies between four and 14 days old.

"I've worked it down to a science," Cotta said. The photo may involve a bucket, a blanket or beanbag, but it's the wrinkly days-old baby who makes the shot.

Three-month-olds are too late.

"When they are that old, they're not as sleepy and not as curly," she said.

Too bad, so sad, punkin.

Moms-to-be start contacting Cotta in their second trimester, because she books six to eight months out. Even if it's too late to get into her schedule, new moms and other aspiring photographers can take her "Newborn Mentoring Workshop," in which she shares the art of newborn posing. The goal is to "capture exactly how little they are in the first few weeks." About 40 percent of the clients taking her workshops are new moms with new cameras.

The camera is the new mirror. But unlike a reflection intended for personal use, this mirror is reflected to the world. It says something semipermanent about you, and a baby has become an extension of that personal brand.

Her clients typically spend between $800 and $2,500 for newborn photos.

Cotta wants to create a piece of work that will evoke, decades later, the same emotions as when the baby was born. Now, there may be a tiny bit of whitewashing required. Cotta says she edits and Photoshops all the images, and in some cases, that may involve smoothing baby skin or "addressing color issues." Sometimes newborns get little scratches or baby acne on their faces, but that's easily erased, too.

"Everything else, I leave it as they are," Cotta said.

Not everyone opts for such a stylized representation of those earliest days.

Beth Kerley, mom to a 13-month-old daughter, booked her newborn shoot near the end of her second trimester. But she didn't want the typical baby-in-a-basket shots. She hired a documentary-style baby photographer, who followed them around their house for a few hours, documenting the new parents taking care of their 3-week-old baby.

She caught images of Kerley's husband making a bottle in the kitchen and holding the baby while watching a hockey game on TV.

"We wanted something that captured how we were feeling and what we were doing at that point of our lives," Kerley said. She had no desire to sit in a studio under lights three weeks after a C-section.

While she opted for a more affordable session ($450), she understands the impulse to overspend.

"Anything associated with babies and weddings, there's a higher price tag because it's a very emotional moment. You're willing to pay more," Kerley said.

She also chose a more low-key, natural look for baby's first professional shoot, but she doesn't judge those who choose a more cultivated option.

She waited until her baby was three weeks old -- pushing the edge of that newborn photo shoot window -- because she wanted to wait until the umbilical cord stump had fallen out.

Their newborn's bellybutton looked picture-perfect.

But Kerley wouldn't be surprised if the photographer touched it up a bit.

I heard a dire prediction of what will become of today's children, the most photographed generation in history.

It didn't have to do with the potential psychological impact of being hyper-documented, although those are legitimate worries.

"The irony is that kids will end up with little visual documentation of their childhood because it will be lost to the cyber world. The 1s and 0s will just go away," said David Carson, one of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Pulitzer-prize-winning photography staff. He's also the father of a much-photographed 9-year-old daughter.

"They are going to lose all this history," he said. Technology changes so quickly, it renders older formats obsolete. Quantity overtakes quality. Performance -- mugging and posing for the camera -- replaces capturing candid moments. And losing it all doesn't require a house fire or natural disaster: All it takes is a technological glitch, a lost phone not backed up, a corrupted hard drive.

It's the paradox of the times we live in: Our children grow up with hundreds of thousands of photographs of their childhoods, yet so few they will hold or carry with them.

We rely on our visual documentation as our memory fades. But the physical experience of revisiting memories has changed. The boxes of photographs stashed in the closet or envelopes shoved in drawers are replaced by albums on social media or camera rolls on our phones. Scrolling through pictures on a screen is viscerally different than thumbing through them in an album or box. At some point, your eyes glaze over digital pixels.

Part of the problem is sheer volume. In the olden days of film (when I was growing up), taking a photo had to be more deliberate and conscious rather than reflexive. The camera came out on birthdays, holidays and vacations. When digital cameras eliminated the cost of film, the floodgates opened. Smartphones provided yet another leap forward. Consumers are expected to take 1 trillion photos this year, according to InfoTrends' 2014 Worldwide Image Capture Forecast. More than 740 billion of those images will be taken using smartphones.

It's not unusual for parents to have thousands of digital images of their children from a single year.

And photo purging is hard.

"You don't get rid of bad pictures," Carson said. "People rarely value a picture enough to print it out."

But as much as we like to believe in the promise of forever in the cloud, veteran photographers are skeptical. Carson doubts if he can still open pictures he took on a digital camera 15 years ago because the technology has changed so much.

One photo editor said he has CDs from the late '90s that won't open anymore. New systems aren't equipped to read old formats.

Of course, hard copy photographs are susceptible to fires and floods, but so are hard drives. And, as recent hacking scandals brought to light, there are privacy concerns in the ether.

So what should you do?

Create an electronic archive and backup, but also take advantage of print deals. Carson suggests periodically picking a few dozen photos that you respond to emotionally and printing those out. Throw them in a shoebox under the bed, or put them in an archival-quality album.

Before ordering a ready-made photo book, check the archival quality to see if books ordered online will hold up decades down the line. Keep in mind that even CDs and DVDs go bad over time.

Give hard drives as gifts. Back up your own drive, and keep it in a different place. I store the negatives of my wedding photos in our bank safety deposit box.

And consider how much documentation of your own childhood you actually revisit.

Perhaps it is time to rethink the photographic legacy we want our children to inherit. I've decided to create four books or albums in a set for each of my children: one for babyhood, another for the elementary school years, then middle school and high school.

This sort of collection seems so much more manageable than a hundred thousand digital images in a virtual gallery. But I imagine we will store (and back up) all the excess images, as well -- just in case we want to meander through a virtual attic one day.

Parents are documenting this generation with gusto; it's just as vital to protect those memories.

After all, preserving the story of someone's life is about more than clicking, sharing and gathering likes.

It's a priceless gift.

Within a few steps at an all-American strip mall just outside St. Louis, you can play Skee-Ball at Chuck E. Cheese's or buy a semi-automatic shotgun at Ruby's Guns.

At this busy intersection in the heart of middle-class suburbia, safety and fear live in the same neighborhood.

For three years in a row, Ballwin, Missouri was lauded as the safest city in the state by real estate website Neighborhood Scout. In 2014, the site ranked it in the top 10 safest cities in the country.

And yet it was here, a few weeks ago, that Michael V. Pona II, 34, allegedly started shooting at vehicles in the middle of the day. One of the bullets hit a Chevy SUV, lodging near a child in a car seat, police said. Another bullet shattered the passenger-side window of a Mustang. No one was hit.

Police are still investigating why the alleged gunman went on this shooting spree.

There's a disturbing familiarity to all of this.

FBI figures released last September show that "active shooter" attacks, in which a shooter opens fire on a crowd of people, have dramatically increased since 2000. The number of incidents more than doubled over the past seven years compared with the previous seven, the FBI study found.

The report found 160 active shooter instances from 2000 until 2013. In the first seven-year span, there were an average of 6.4 incidences annually. Between 2007 and 2013, the annual average jumped to 16.4 incidences.

The majority of active shooters are not considered mass killers, however, because a majority of these shooters kill fewer than three people.

We've gotten to a point where open fire can seem oddly ordinary despite otherwise extraordinarily safe surroundings. Perhaps even more peculiar than the frequency of such instances is our reaction to them.

"One of the problems is that a person can be perfectly mentally stable and pass a background check on Monday, and all hell can break loose Tuesday through Friday," said Steve Walsh, owner of Ruby's Guns. "And there's no way to know it."

But, in fact, there are ways to know it, or least to have a better idea of it. There's research that indicates what makes one gun user more dangerous to society than the next. Unsurprisingly, prior history is significant. And there are ways to keep guns away from dangerously angry people without infringing on the rights of law-abiding citizens.

Researchers from Duke, Harvard and Columbia universities analyzed data from more than 5,000 face-to-face interviews and discovered that nearly 9 percent of people in the United States have self-admitted outbursts of anger -- some of them getting into physical fights and breaking or smashing things -- and also have easy access to firearms. The researchers say one way to lower gun violence would be to prohibit those with violent misdemeanor convictions, such as assault or brandishing a weapon, along with those with multiple DUIs, from purchasing firearms.

Serious mental illness, which can lead to involuntary civil commitment and thereby legally prevent someone from purchasing a gun, only accounts for about 4 percent of U.S. gun violence, according to study author Jeffrey Swanson.

Walsh says there have been times he has turned away potential customers in his store who didn't seem mentally stable to him. He's told others to take a class before he sells them a weapon. He wondered, when he heard about the shooting a few miles down the road, if the perpetrator was one of his former customers. There's also an American Arms and Supply gun shop within half a mile of the incident.

But he doesn't believe that any additional laws or restrictions will reduce gun violence. He says the problem is that the country has gotten too far away from God.

Even in Ballwin, a relative bastion of safety, most of Walsh's customers say they buy guns for protection. During the protests in Ferguson, the store was selling so many weapons, they couldn't keep enough guns in stock, his office manager said.

Meanwhile, he sees nothing unusual about his store's proximity to a place where "a kid can be a kid."

"Any parent that doesn't educate a child on how to use a gun is foolish," he said. It's a part of life, he added.

Not everyone wants guns to be a part of their child's life.

No parent, regardless of their gun ownership, wants their child hurt or killed by a stray bullet or an angry, out-of-control person. There should be no argument around the notion that dangerous people should not have guns.

Those who dismiss research-supported suggestions on ways to reduce gun violence have accepted that these kinds of shootings are, in fact, a part of life.

The truth is: They don't have to be.