Slow Summer
You're already nostalgic for this. You just don't know it yet.
Half-day documentary sessions for families who want to remember what it felt like.
Reserve a Founding Session
✳︎
Reserve a Founding Session ✳︎
Manifesto
Think of your happiest summer memory.
Maybe you're at camp, or on the beach, or on your dad's boat with the wind doing whatever it wants to your hair. You can feel it — the warm dock boards, the water still on your skin, the way an afternoon could last a year.
You can still smell it — the sunscreen, the lake near the shoreline, hot pavement after a summer rain. But the photographs you have, if you have them, don't carry that. They're the lined-up-and-smiling kind, or the blurry phone kind, or they just don't exist at all. They don't smell like anything.
That's the gap I made Slow Summer for. Not another session where everyone wears the outfits and holds the smile for an hour. A whole unhurried stretch of a real summer day — the lake, the sprinkler, the sandy towels, the popsicle negotiations — with me quietly inside it, making the photographs your kids will use to remember this exact, unrepeatable summer. The one where the front teeth were missing. The one before the baby could walk.
You already know these are the good old days. Slow Summer is how you keep them.
What it is
Maybe it's the cabin your family goes back to every August. Maybe it's the lake, the coast house, the grandparents' backyard with the garden and the dog. Or maybe you don't have a place like that — maybe your perfect summer day is ice cream in Hood River and a trail through the mountain, or a new swimming hole you found on a map, or just the backyard sprinkler and a blanket in the grass. It doesn't have to be a postcard. It just has to be yours. You know that one day you'll reach back for this exact summer with outstretched fingers. The week the front teeth were missing. The last year everyone fit in the hammock. The afternoon your daughter learned to swim. These are the memories that would help you fly if you were Peter Pan. Slow Summer is how you keep them.
A Slow Summer session is a half day — around four golden hours — spent doing what your family would actually do on a perfect summer day. There is no shot list, no posing, no "everyone look at me." You swim. You snack. You read on the blanket while the kids argue about who saw the fish first. Maybe you build a kite, or make a meal together, or paint something you'll keep on the fridge until October. I move around the edges of it, and what you get back is not a set of portraits but a story: the whole texture of a day in your family's life, in this exact season of it.
And because I'm the one holding the camera, nobody else has to. A Slow Summer day is a screen-less day — no phones out, no "get one for mine too," just your whole family actually inside the afternoon instead of documenting it. Fully present, totally unhurried, completely handmade. Knitting grandmas welcome.
The honest truth is that forty-five minutes is enough time to photograph what a family looks like. A slow afternoon is what it takes to photograph what a family is.
THE SESSIONS
The Long Afternoon — local half-day
A half-day session within about ninety minutes of Portland. A lake morning, a backyard sprinkler day, a favorite swimming hole, an unhurried afternoon that starts in the kitchen and ends in the yard. Includes the full documentary gallery, a print release, and my location guide to the swimming holes, lakes, and quiet places I love most — or we build the day around a place that's already yours.
$1,600 · The first two families book at the founding rate of $975 — details below. Sessions beyond 90 minutes from Portland: add a $200 travel fee.
The Faraway Day — destination full-day
For the cabin weekend, the coast trip, the San Juans. You're already going; I come with you for a full day of it. Kayaks, dock jumps, tidepools, the summer sweater over the swimsuit, dinner outside while the light goes long. I stay where you stay, so the day starts when breakfast starts. This is the closest thing to time travel I know how to offer.
$2,600 + travel · Family provides lodging. Limited availability — inquire.
Add-on for either session: a linen heirloom album, hand-sequenced by me, made to be pulled off the shelf every August for the next forty years.
THE FOUNDING RATE
Slow Summer is brand new, and I want its first two families to help me shape it. The first two sessions booked this summer are $975 instead of $1,600 — anywhere within 90 minutes of Portland, which gives us the coast, the Gorge, the mountain, or your own backyard. In exchange, I'll ask for your honest feedback on the experience and permission to share a few favorite images. After these two spots are gone, sessions are full price — so if this is speaking to you, it's worth saying so soon.
Get In Touch
If you're interested in working with us, complete the form with a few details about your project. We'll review your message and get back to you within 48 hours.