Hello! I'm Jess.
I believe love is worth celebrating.
I believe families of all kinds are beautiful.
I believe photography is an art form worth learning for everyone.
I believe in the saying "create something every day" and practice it in my own life.
I believe displaying images of your family in your home increases self esteem in kids.
I believe learning to cook homemade food is an important life skill.
I believe small businesses are an asset to communities.
I believe experiencing new things is imperative to keeping an open mind.
Hello! I’m Jess, photographer since forever, lover of National Parks, public lands, city vibes, travel, and photographing people. To create and share art is something that is in my soul, and has been from the beginning. My journey as a small business owner photographing weddings, families, and corporate assignments began in 2004. (keep reading to "photographic roots" for the technical stuff)
I love my family - my husband Josh, three kids, and our duck tolling retriever named Luna Lovegood (IYKYK!). Running a small business while raising a family isn't easy, but for me it has been an incredible gift that allows me to spend more time with my kids. I’ll cherish forever the long, loud, messy days when they were toddlers, and now am enjoying my pre-teens and teenager even more than I thought I would. Life shifts so much between these two stages of parenting - and life - and I’m so grateful I have an enormous collection of photographs of their little antics and funny moments to look back on with them. This is where my passion for photographing children and families comes from.
In 2021, Josh and I fulfilled a dream of experiencing the country with our kids. We packed up the kids, cameras, and al the courage we could muster into an RV and headed towards the open road. 15 months later, we had crossed the country twice and experienced dozens of incredible national parks, state parks, museums, cities, and historic sites as a family. I photographed all of it, of course. This experience is proof to me that crazy dreams can become reality, our country is beautiful, there are so many wonderful people out there to meet, and tiny living really does bring a family closer together.
Upon coming back from our adventure, we landed - quite by accident but thankful for it - right outside of Newport, RI. If you are a Rhode Island client who has never heard of me, that’s why! And if you are from my old stomping grounds in Medfield, MA or North Attleboro, MA - photographing in and around that area is like coming home and quite a treat.
When I’m not photographing on assignment, I’m practicing one of my other love languages - cooking with my chef-in-the-making middle kid, crafting with my youngest (she’s got her momma’s drive to create!), watching my oldest chase his dreams - literally - at a track meet, throwing pottery at my favorite local pottery studio, creating music (I was inspired by a wonderful ukelele player at a wedding ceremony years ago and picked it up shortly after) or dreaming up new places to travel.
I love to meet new people and absolutely believe in the power of connection through conversation and shared laughter. I look forward to getting to know you!
PHOTOGRAPHIC ROOTS
I specialize in photography of people, and have since 2000. Trained in a darkroom at a fine-art college in upstate New York, I then worked for two years as a commercial photographer in Boston. It was still all film then, both 35mm and medium-format. I loved the hustle of running from assignment to assignment then back to the darkroom. The experience of balancing assignment logistics, clients, camera technique, composition, and light was the ultimate in photography assignment training and a foundation I still stand on today.
Through a series of those funny life events that you don’t expect, I ended up photographing weddings in 2001. It was then that I quickly recognized and fell in love with the challenge of documentary wedding photography, and with the significance of what those images meant to the couples and their families. Those couples grew into families (as my own family grew!) and I began photographing families professionally in 2008. Now, with an incredible client base whom I adore, I balance wedding, portrait and commercial work. I am a photographer of people.
I use both professional Nikon and Sony gear, with a mix of prime and zoom lenses. I mix natural light with off-camera flash to create authentic images that are true to the moment, with editing that is timeless instead of trendy. Adobe lightroom and photoshop are always churning out something on my computers, and my backup systems are a mix of cloud and local storage. A large collection of medium-format film cameras from earlier days is still a treasured part of my collection as well. Of course, none of the gear matters if the image doesn't say something, which is why even after 20 years I still make time to critique with colleagues and advance my skills of making meaningful images.
MOMENTS OF VALUE
Many clients ask what is my favorite thing to photograph. Creating images of my kids as they grow up, as we experience this life and world together, has incredible meaning to me. It's with the understanding of the value those images hold to our family that I photograph my client's own moments of extraordinary value.
