A couples session on the cottage dock
Couples · Muskoka · Summer 2026
They've been married for years and have almost none of it in photographs — which is the whole reason we drove up to the lake.
The session
Lilia & Taras
Lilia and Taras have been together a long time — married, settled, the kind of couple who finish each other's coffee orders. What they don't have is pictures. In all their years together they'd barely stood in front of a camera, and it had started to bother them, so they booked an evening at the lake to fix it. They're not really outdoors people, and Lilia said as much, laughing, as she picked her way down to the dock in the wrong shoes. It didn't matter. They weren't there for the wilderness. They were there for each other, and for the dogs.
They'd brought both dogs — Eva and Tommy — though it was Eva they most wanted in the frames. She's the older of the two, greying a little at the muzzle now, and they were honest about why it mattered to have her in these while they still could. We worked slowly, on the deck first and then out along the dock, the same lake and the same low gold light I'd had the evening before, the water going flat and warm as the sun dropped behind the hills.
There's an ease to a couple who've been together this long — nothing to prove, nobody performing. Lilia stretched out across Taras's lap on the warm dock boards, Eva pressed in against them, and for a while nobody moved at all. The frame they'll keep is a quiet one, the three of them at the end of the dock with the far shore going soft and the last of the sun on the water. Not a wild night. Just the proof they'd been missing that this is what all those years have looked like.
Years together, and hardly a photograph to show for it. This was the evening we fixed that.
Eva's greying at the muzzle now. They wanted these while they still could.
A cottage on a lake in Muskoka
Cottage country a couple of hours north — deep clean lakes, granite and pine, and a west-facing dock that holds the light right up to sunset. Best in the last two hours of the day in July, when the wind drops and the lake goes to glass. Bring bug spray for the evening mosquitoes and something warm for after the sun is down, and if you are bringing dogs, come early and let them run off the drive before you start — they settle better once they've had the shoreline.