It is seemingly impossible to take too many photos of your children, but it is possible to take too few. When I first picked up a camera I shot everything. All. The. Time. My camera seemed to be permanently positioned in front of my face. I have folder upon folder on my computer of photographs of my girls. Archived by year and then by month and sometimes even by event. Every year since 2009. But then I realized the other day that I don’t have one folder for 2013. No January. No February. No March. I promised myself I would never stop shooting just because. But I did. I rarely pick my camera up anymore when I’m at home. And I hate that. A lot. Ferris Bueller once said that “life is pretty short. If you don’t stop to look around once in awhile, you could miss it.” So last...
the time I played in the snow on a perfect winter day.
No matter how often I may say otherwise, I’m not that old. I suppose technically I’m still young, but I am old enough to know that life is short. Fleeting, really. And the best parts move at the fastest speeds. Though the clock seems to slow during the parts we know we need to savor, the second we blink time has sped up and memories are whisked feverishly into the annals of our minds. Stacked and categorized by sensation and feeling. Momentum and mood. It’s a cruel trick that time plays on our minds, and on our hearts. This dichotomy of time and movement was the most clear to me when my grandfather was in the last months of his life. As I watched him slowly fade into the recesses as a tired, old man, I also watched my daughters spring into their childhood. Loud, voracious, awkward and gangly. Their...
cortney + trent | winter maternity photography
I don’t shoot maternity sessions. It’s not that I don’t want to – or don’t like to – it’s simply that I haven’t really been presented the opportunity (save for once, at the very beginning of my career). So when my friend Cortney asked if I’d be interested in documenting her and her husband Trent’s journey into parenthood, I (literally) jumped at the chance. I’ve known these two for nearly seven years, and just after we met they got married. I raised a glass and toasted their love, and I danced voraciously with them afterward. I was pregnant with my first child at the time, so in a lot of ways it’s as though the circle is completing itself. Cortney and I worked in the same office for a number of years – and we spent a lot of time together. Talking. Dreaming. Planning. Laughing. Encouraging. I adore this girl...
where the wild things are | minneapolis family photography
There is a magic in childhood that is so powerful it exists in many of us far into adulthood. We are the lucky ones. The ones that hold onto the magic of belief. Grip it tightly in our grasps – we hold steadfast to the power of dreaming. Of believing. Of imagination. I’d like you to meet William (as well as his big brother and his momma). In these photographs he is two years old and filled to bursting with wonder. This fall we spent an evening in a sun-filled park. Screeching. Squealing. Laughing. Running. Chasing. We ran for what seemed like hours, but I couldn’t catch him. I was chasing a boy, but the boy wasn’t evading me. He was busy running after fireflies and the last rays of the setting sun. William was adrift in that place that Maurice Sendak wrote about. The place where only things you...