Every year, spring takes my breath away. One day it’s cold and gray, and the next, the world is quietly bursting back to life, especially after all the rain we have had. Here in Ashland,Oregon that shift is especially breathtaking this year—the pear orchards seem to have bloomed almost overnight, and the hillsides look like Switzerland with green. And every year, I’m reminded how quietly change can happen, and how easy it is to miss it while it's happening. While also know this too will change!

Lately, I’ve been noticing the need to slow time down. To really see the moments I love most—and spring itself is one of them. I find myself trying to be in the moment and enjoy the blooming change before it disappears. A perfect pear orchard only blooms for about a week. Then the next week there is anther burst of color somewhere else, it's rather exhilarating and exhausting.  Maybe I am chasing perfection with my camera. But maybe, more than that, I’m just trying to hold on to what I love dearly. The photo is a compromise. Making art out of the moment. 

That’s where photography comes in for me. It’s how I hold on. I hold on to a place people—families, couples, kids—into these fleeting, extraordinary Southern Oregon spring scenes, and I press pause. Spring outdoor portraits in Ashland aren’t just about the beauty of light and color (though, let’s be honest, they’re magic). They’re about freezing something real in time.They matter because they help us hold on to the feeling of a season—both in nature, and in life.And I think that’s what I love most about photographing in spring. The season is a living reminder that we can’t keep anything exactly as it is—but we can choose to see it, to honor it, and to make something lasting from it. A photograph is a way to plant a seed of a moment you want to remember again and again, like the cycle of the seasons.

There’s also something deeper I can’t ignore—an artist’s ache. When I don’t follow it, something in me fades. But when I listen—when I make something from the beauty around me—I feel alive. Photography is how I answer that calling. It’s how I add a little more art, a little more light, into the world.

If that speaks to you too, maybe it’s time we take some photos together.