For lots of photographers, golden hour is the time when we love to shoot photos. Especially when you get tiny bits of it during the gloomy and foggy season of San Francisco. It’s where the light is the best, no worry about odd shadows from a midday sun casting on the subject. But also, it just seems to be when the world feels….right. But the only problem is, is that the most beautiful light of the day, lasts maybe 30 min, sometimes an hour. It’s fleeting, but it makes a lasting impression. Maybe it’s so beautiful because the amount of time bathing in that light is short.

Ash and I talk about how we lucky we are in this life.
Our daughter Emmy has a strong relationship with her grandparents (Ash’s mom and dad). There are times when we all get together with Ash’s sister’s nuclear family along with the grandparents. If it’s good weather we sit outside, usually over dinner and a few beers watching Emmy and her cousins run around outside.

I think about when Emmy gets older, how she’ll move away. Or even before then, how she’ll want to be hanging out with her friends rather than us. We feel so connected right now as a small family unit that it’s hard to imagine breaking it up. Looking back, four years ago seems like a long time, but it actually flew by quick. Before we knew it, we went from having a baby still pooping in her diaper to a kid asking about how turtles breathe underwater.

You realize that time travel actually exists. But it’s only stuck in one direction unfortunately.

But there are times that you get glimpses of that warm light in your life. For me it was on this trip to the Bay Area and

We heard somewhere about the idea of being in the sunset period of life, where everything and everyone you love is around. I realized that Ash and I are in that golden hour of our own life for awhile. We have our own daughter who wants to spend every minute with us, the grandparents are here with us, Emmy is at that stage where she’s turning into her own person, and even though the pandemic makes things a bit tricky, everything is alright. And so when I took these photos, I didn’t want to take photos of the actual sunset or to shoot all our photos in that light, but to try and show what it feels like to live in it.

The feeling of golden hour