Hickok Family at Home

The childhood home.

There is something so special about returning to the place you grew up with your own kids. Letting them get a glimpse into what your childhood was like. Picking raspberries from the same bushes you plucked berries from 15 years ago.

I am a deeply sentimental, nostalgic individual and feel so fortunate to have so many wonderful memories of summers spent with my maternal grandparents in Montana and my paternal grandmother in Oregon. So it comes as no surprise that some of my favorite family photos are the ones taken during younger families’ trips to their childhood home.

A few of my favorite snaps from one such trip home for the Hickok family.

Allie, Lucy + Andy: Motherhood Session with Horses

2023 was a year of thinking hard about what I want to create and what I want to give each family who steps in front of my lens. I couldn’t narrow it down to a specific theme, aesthetic, location, or anything else, but the one thing that stayed in the back of my mind was the idea of artfully documenting REAL family moments. For years, the term “lifestyle” has been used to describe more candid photography, but what if it actually meant “photography that captures your real lives”? And that’s what I realized I wanted to do.

I want to focus on the minutiae of your daily lives. What do you and your kids love to do right now? Is one kiddo fascinated by dinosaurs? What if you just brought me along on a trip to the Museum of the Rockies, or even simpler - what if we just play with the dinos in your backyard sandbox? With this fresh blanket of snow we got today, we could bundle the kids up, head out to the backyard and make some snow angels, or head to the sledding hill for a bit, then head home for some hot cocoa. Let’s simplify the idea of family photos and focus on preserving the things you truly want to remember about your lives at this stage. Bonus: by keeping it simple and building a session around things your kids already know and love, they’re much more likely to be happy and open up so we can capture their true personalities!

For Allie and her family, horses are a huge part of their lives. They work cattle with them, they take in rescues and give them a loving home, and the girls get to grow up knowing what it means to care for and be responsible for these incredible animals. For this motherhood session, it only made sense to include their sweet mares.

So what do you want to remember about this time? Let’s create a session around those things! Extra bonus: film is inherently well-suited to this type of session. It’s nostalgic and perfectly imperfect, leaving you with images that truly bottle up the feeling and essence of this season.

Film scans by The FIND Lab