Life’s most precious moments often happen in the in-between: the giggles, the snuggles, the silly chaos of everyday family life. As a South Bend photographer, I specialize in capturing the beauty of your “right now,” so you can treasure it forever.

Four generations of Wilkerson women gathering at Great Grandma’s house in Elkhart, Indiana to introduce a new family member to the matriarch.

A special kind of magic happens when you have a real moment mixed with sweetness captured on film.

Like many of you, I place a high value on sentimentality, but also on realism. A little tantrum here, a “blooper” there… adding just a drop or two of reality into your film grounds it and takes away the lie that “my family isn’t perfect so I can participate in a session like this”.

Maybe your children are getting older into those teen years and you’re looking around and you’re realizing you don’t have any photos with your older child. They are getting ready to pick a college, or have a graduation party, and you don’t have as many family photos. Just because they aren’t toddlers anymore doesn't mean that this stage of life shouldn’t be documented. It’s still the last time they will be this little!

Those pictures are important. For you and for them, whether they act like it or not. Let’s take those photos.

Imagine shelves full of binder style photo albums, some of the pages crooked in the neat stack of pages because one of the punch holes ripped. This is what our dad’s book shelves were lined with. He would print triples by the time we got to high school, one for each of us and one for him. Sometimes, instead of giving us a copy, he’d give a whole set to the friend we went on vacation with. I vividly remember where the photo department was at each of the places he developed the photographs. I searched for our name on the yellow Kodak or green Fuji envelopes, scratched out in his capitals-only handwriting. I could hardly stand the 3 day wait we had to endure to go pick them up.