Hi I'm Sara

I'm a wedding and family photographer based in St. Albert, Alberta.

I've been doing this for fifteen years. Before I photographed weddings, I photographed people in a lot of different rooms — refugee camps, villages in the aftermath of things most people never see, a movie set in Colombia in 2011 (where it all started for me), a lot of Africa, a long stretch of Europe, a life in Barcelona.

That work is where I learned how to pay attention. It's the reason I photograph the way I do.

The long way around.

HOW I GOT HERE

I bought my first camera from a friend in 2008, right before a documentary trip to Colombia. I didn't know it at the time, but that trip ended up being the rest of my life.

For the next several years, I moved between places. I started a small non-profit in Ethiopia. I photographed the Syrian border in 2015, during the war, with people we were working to bring to Canada. I've been to Africa ten times. I lived in Barcelona for two years — that's where I honed most of what I know about light and people and being in the right place quietly.

Somewhere in there, I learned how to disappear in a room. How to photograph people without them noticing, or without it feeling like a camera was there. How to see what's actually happening instead of what's being performed for me. That's the skill I carry into every wedding day now — and it's why my favourite photographs are almost always the ones nobody remembers me taking.

I grew up spending summers on Gabriola Island with my grandparents. They were my favourite part of being a kid. They're both gone now, and I hate it.

I think about them when I photograph people. I think about how much I'd give to have one more photograph of them, one more moment — the way they really were, not the way they would have posed. That's the photograph I'm trying to make for you.

What Came Next

A few years ago, life looked very different than it does now.
I rebuilt this business from the ground up as a single mom with a baby. That's a story for another day — but it's the reason I understand, at a bone level, what it means when a family says "please make these photos matter." They always matter. I don't take that lightly.
Now I live in St. Albert with my partner and our two kids. I photograph weddings all over Alberta, families who want to remember the ordinary days, and couples who want their wedding to feel like memory more than performance. I cook too much food. I read slower than everyone I know.
I'm a person who lives a little in the past — for better or worse, it turns out, that’s exactly the kind of person you want photographing your memories.

WHO I WORK WITH NOW

The couples and families I photograph care more about how the day felt than how it looked on a shot list. The families I photograph want honest images of who their people actually are, not a perfectly-styled wall-ready portrait. The mothers who book me trust me with the messy, tender, quiet parts of their lives — which is exactly what I want to photograph.
If you've been scrolling through my work and it's making you feel something you can't quite name — that's probably what we're making together. I'd love to hear about your day, whatever it is.

❋ The greatest movies live somewhere between 1998 and 2004. I will not be taking questions on this.

❋ I'm a slow reader. And I have to read everything twice, because my mind wanders.

❋ I have a large collection of cookbooks and I study food the way I learned photography — obsessively. I'll spend hours sourcing the right ingredients to get a dish exactly right.

❋ I wear denim year-round. A lot of Canadian tuxedos, just like my grandma. Her old jean jacket is my favourite thing I own.

❋ I've been to every continent except Antarctica. If you're getting married there, just buy me a plane ticket and I'll kick it off my bucket list.

❋ I love the first snowfall, but I'm over it by December 26.