5 Big Reasons for Family Photos at Home

Where I am based out of - Southern Maine - there is an abundance of beautiful locations to meet up for family photos. Every once in a while I’ll post a question to a group of women’s business owners asking for suggestions on location and my messages are flooded with the most spectacularly beautiful places. I love meeting up with families for on location shoots, it combines a little bit of adventure with a lot of the natural beauty of our state usually resulting in incredible photos. Sometimes though, the best place for family photos is in your home. Before you stop me because your home isn’t a perfectly staged mansion straight from the pages of a magazine, take a moment to read ahead. I could go on about this forever but here are just FIVE big reasons you may want to have family photos at home:

  1. Kids are comfortable at home - What is the best way to look comfortable and have fun in front of a camera? To actually BE comfortable and have fun in front of a camera. For most people, familiar surroundings can mean just being more relaxed in general. This is especially true for kids.

  2. Kids love to show me their stuff - Some of my favorite photos from family sessions at home have been when your kids show me their favorite things. Kids bond to certain items, I know I did, I STILL have my little plush dog “Toto” to this day. Not only is it sweet to have a photo that shows them with their prized possessions, asking them to show me their favorite things is a great way to break the ice with a kiddo. This also can lead to some really wonderful play time photos. My family photography walks the line between documentary and portraiture - sometimes the best photos come from completely unstaged moments where kids just do their thing. In these moments, I don’t intervene, there is a time for them to pose and smile but while they are playing isn’t it! Just let them be the incredible little people that they are.

  3. If you need a break everything is there for you - It is sometimes impossible to get out of the house with everything you need, everyone fed, everyone’s diaper changed, hair done, makeup on, ready to go for photos. I mean, just writing about it makes me feel exhausted.

  4. You won’t feel rushed to arrive on time - You will already be there. Need a few more minutes to get your makeup on, brush your hair, eat a snack before we begin?  No problem, it’s all there for you.

  5. Photography of your family in your home creates a record of a place that is crucial to your children’s core memories -  This one may be the most important. I moved with my family and my single mother in the 80’s and 90’s ELEVEN times before graduating high school. There was a ton of upheaval and a ton of fractured memories, toys lost, and ruined things that I loved.  There are extended periods of time that are blurry.  The photos that remain - and there are only a few - are some of the only things that can ground me when I examine my life in retrospect. When I look back at my family photos, I see the place I grew up in, for good or bad, documented as it truly was, and it instantly brings me back. Photography, especially when printed or in a book or album is both a record of a time and a place but also an archive of a family history. I cherish the photos of me as a child in the places that I remember and your kids will too. 


The possibilities for picking a great location for family photos are many. Before you decide to load everyone up and embark on a big outing, think about the wonder and beauty that is already around you in your house. Consider the possibility that your own home is a great place too. 

Interested in booking a family photo session in your home or neighborhood? Let me know, send me a message here. I can’t wait to take photos together.

a small boy holds a plush duck, and is sitting in a dining room
a small boy with curly red hair, wearing a dark red shirt is holding a toy truck and looking down at it. He is standing in a living room.
a small Asian girl holds up a favorite stuffy, a fuzzy dog to show the camera. She is smiling and looking directly into the camera. She is standing in a hallway
a teen boy with turquoise hair wearing an orange shirt and a blond woman in a white shirt and tan cardigan sit on a blue and white flower patterned couch.
a blond haired blue eyed boy stands inside a home holding out a small shell in his hand.
a woman stands holding a tiny baby in a yard. She is white with dark hair and the baby is wearing striped pajamas.
a family stands on their front stairs. the house is light yellow. there are four children, a man, and a woman holding a baby
a blond toddler sits atop a plush tiger, a woman sits just behind them smiling in the background
a man, a little girl in a sweater and dress, and a woman stand on the sidewalk, they are smiling and looking at something off camera to the left
an image of three children smiling and laughing in the grass.

Imaginary Island Dance in performance at Space 538 in Portland Maine. March 30th, 2023

The story of how I became a photographer often feels like a long one. It started, like so many things in my life, with my lifelong practice and love of dance.

Dance and photography are woven together for me. Times when I danced more seriously were accompanied by a nagging impulse to photograph myself and others moving. Now, when I am working as a photographer, I am connected to and informed by the perspectives and compositional techniques I learned for over three decades in dance classrooms. 

It is rare that you will find me sitting still, taking static images with a camera on a tripod. Movement and photography are two sides of the same coin for me. They just go together. When I am taking photographs I am moving: dodging, bobbing, weaving, swaying, crawling, kneeling, up on my tippy toes, and sometimes climbing on furniture. I am often mirroring my subject’s movement throughout a session, if they jump, I jump too. Connecting photo making with movement is the culmination of so many things that inspire and drive me in my life. It keeps me awake.

So, when dancers hire me to photograph them, it is such an absolute gift. Both of my passions are combined, to create something that is truly wonderful.  Dance and photography are very different in their forms, but share so much. The common ground between them is that both deal in the passage and experience of time.  Imaginary Island, a dance company based in Portland, Maine invited me to photograph them in performance at Space 538, a gallery and venue on March 30th. Working with Imaginary Island was such a joy and I am so proud of the images that were created during their rehearsal and live performance. Without further ado, a collection of my favorite images from “You Are Going To Be Healed” by Imaginary Island. 

A photo of dancer lit in blue light. She is kneeling and leaning to one side with one arm arced above her head and is looking up at her hand. There is a blue spotlight next to her and and audience in the background.
a photo of a dancer covered in a shaggy rope covered costume. There is a dancer out of focus in the background
a picture of a dancer in a Nirvana t-shirt and lavender pants. Her arms are stretching up to the ceiling and she is making a big surprised face.
an image of two dancers performing on a stage. They are lit in blue. One dancer is kneeling down and the other dancer is in the air.
am image of a dancer in blue light, kneeling down, wearing a long sleeved dress, pants, and high heels.
Tow dancers are dancing with their backs towards the camera, facing and raising their arms to a large pink sculpture with a salt lamp on top.



A Year of Documentary Family Photography: introducing "Trip Around the Sun"

I can’t believe it is December already. This last year we have all had to pivot, then re-pivot, then again, and again. Things are changing still, always, forever. Every time I think I know what is going to happen… things up and change. Each day I remind myself to be gentle with those who are grieving, and that is everyone now. We have all lost someone or something, some people many someones and somethings, it can feel heavy to face that.

When I was little I would sit for hours poring over my mother’s photo albums. I would leaf through each page, one by one. I’d ask her to tell me the story of each photo, where it was taken, who were the people in it, what year was it taken? Seeing the permanence that a photo held struck me even then. If you invite me over to your house, which perhaps someday you will, I will instantly be drawn to your wall of photos, your fridge, your gallery of school portraits on your stairway, the portrait of your grandmother in a tiny ornate frame on your desk. A blurry photo of your childhood pet, the one that was yours. The history of your family told through images will pull me in, I can’t tell you how many parties I’ve been to where I can barely hold a conversation because I’m too distracted looking at pictures. I don’t know how to help it, and I’m not sure I would want to if I could.

When I think about the thing that keeps me coming back to this work, this practice of photographing people, this dream of making a career out of it, it is that when I am taking photos of you, I am creating a chronicle of your life, something you can come back to years later. A photo can seem so commonplace now, in this world where everyone has a phone camera on them at all times, but I promise you, documenting your life is powerful. It is a window into your world that remains open. Photos are a fixed point, they defy time and space. It is thrilling.

I have been so fortunate to be able to photograph the same families over the course of time, to see how their lives have changed, to see their children grow, to witness and document the shaping and reshaping of lives, and have had the privilege of being invited in to photograph that.

I am offering a new type of session format, taking this thing that I love and making it intentional. I call it:

▸ Trip Around the Sun

A series of documentary photo sessions to create a visual archive of your life over the course of one year.

There are three options you can choose from.

  1. 12 one-hour documentary sessions, one per month, for one year, at 20% off ($316 per session.)

  2. 6 one-hour documentary sessions, one every other month, for one year, at 15% off ($335 per session.)

  3. 4 one-hour documentary sessions, one every three months, for one year, at 10% off ($355 per session.)

Each session will be chronologically added on to an online gallery and after the course of a year, there will be a full collection of images from your life.

Do you have questions? Please, let’s talk! I would love to hear from you. Contact me HERE.


When things don't go as planned

I used to think I had a pretty good idea of what the future was going to look like. I built my life around this imaginary future. The career trajectory that I was plotting, the idea of the future, of what I thought my life was going to be. The details were expected to change, but the events of this year so far are ones that I never planned for. The last few months have been ROUGH, worldwide, nationwide, locally. Even the countries and communities that are faring best in this global pandemic are having a rough year. Let’s just sit inside of that and dig into this discomfort, because we may be here a while. While it feels much safer to cling to the things that make me comfortable, I’ve always been more of a “just rip the band-aid off” kind of person; I’d much rather face things head on. Despite how painful it can be, even when my instinct is to retreat, I can’t. There are things greater than myself that need so much more attention right now than the meager offerings that I have to give as an artist. My aspirations for my photography business are on hold right now, I spend most days working on keeping my children from feeling isolated and bored, I plan, and budget, and do dishes, so many dishes. We strategically plan outings, armed with masks and sanitizer, we listen to scientists, we read, we read some more. Still, I can’t help but feel that documentation of the world right now is important. I have been shooting more than ever before. I have also been shooting film more than I have in the last five years. It feels like going home. I’m not sure how I ended up living in the wrong era, where everything I am good at used to be a good way to make a living, but is now only viewed as a hobby, but here I am. So, here are a few shots taken with a really lovely roll of Lomo-chrome purple, a film with an intentional color shift, mimicking the infra-red films that are so expensive and difficult to work with. I am simply in love with the results of this film in my forever BFF, my Pentax K1000. Here, is a quick glimpse at a few moments from the summer of 2020, pandemic, life in Maine.

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Get your Holiday photos in time 2019!

Not to be too short, but ok, here’s the deal: 30 minutes, on location, you, your family, fur babies, friends, dress up, or don’t. It’s up to you. Be you. Let’s get some pictures ready for holiday cards. $125, 10-25 final high-resolution digital files. All November long. Contact me to set up an appointment. Offer expires November 30, 2019.

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Family photo time!

Recently, a photographer friend of mine noted that “children and animals are the worst things to try and photograph.” I was like, “What. Are. You. Talking About?!” I think that this common sentiment is rooted in an old school mentality that children should be seen and not heard, should behave, and should fit into a rigid ideal for what society deems “appropriate behavior.” While I’m all for perfectly posed toddler photos, and the rare unicorn that they are, I think that it’s time we get real about who these little people are that we share our lives with. I don’t want to capture a picture of your little tiny kid doing anything other than being exactly who they are meant to be in that very moment that I’m with them. I don’t mind getting my clothes dirty, getting in the grass, playing in the leaves, or chasing them around. Photography is about freezing a moment in time, one that we will never get back. Why would we want to remember that as anything other than it truly is?

So here it is, the end of summer sale!! 30 minutes, 15-25 high definition digital files. At a location of your choosing (within 25 miles of South Portland.) For $115! Book between Friday August 15th and September 1st to take advantage of this price!!

You, your family, fur babies, friends, chosen family, or just you, doing something you love to do.

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Joy at Sunflower Farm

 

 

It was a beautiful, sunny day, so we decided to take a short drive north to Cumberland to visit Sunflower Farm.  They have a herd of Nigerian Dwarf Goats who are quite possibly the sweetest, mellowest, friendliest goats I have ever encountered.  As we were getting ready to leave, we decided to pick up some fresh chevre from the self serve farm stand.  While we were there, one of the owners of the farm, Hope Hall said, "Hey, if you want, I'm making some fresh herb cheese right now, if you can wait a minute, it's almost done."  Then, we watched her pick a sprig of rosemary and take it with her into the kitchen where she finished making the cheese.  "This cheese is made from yesterday's milking." She said.  My husband and I looked at eachother, how have we ended up in this happy little goat farm, foodie, paradise?  I happened to just have a package of crackers in my bag, because with two small children I never leave the house without snacks, so as we drove off into the beautiful, Maine Indian Summer, we ate a delicious snack from some of the freshest cheese made with milk from goats we got to meet and pet.  It was so joyful.

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