A golden hour family session in the meadow
Family · Cambridge · Summer 2026
They hung a linen banner between two young poplars — Evan Is Two — and then spent the hour chasing the boy who couldn't read it yet.
The session
Roman, Olia & Evan
Roman and Olia booked the hour for Evan, who was turning two and had no idea any of it was for him. They'd made the banner themselves — plain linen, hand-lettered, EVAN IS TWO — and strung it between two young poplars at the edge of a natural reserve just outside Cambridge, where the meadow runs long and the grass that evening was up past the boy's shoulders.
We had maybe forty minutes of good light. The sun was already low over the treeline when we started, coming through sideways and turning everything the colour of honey — the dry August grass, Olia's hair, the wildflowers gone to seed. Evan was not interested in sitting. He'd settle against his dad for exactly as long as it took me to lift the camera, then he was off — toward the banner, or a bug, or the long white streamer of fabric Roman kept letting go in the wind so the boy would laugh and chase it down the field.
The frame they printed is the three of them on the ground in front of the banner, none of them looking at me — Olia mid-sentence, Roman laughing at whatever it was, Evan already halfway out of the picture. It isn't the tidy one. But it's the true one — a young family in a gold field at the end of a summer day, not posing so much as forgetting the camera was there. Which, with a two-year-old, is the only kind of photograph worth waiting for.
He'd sit still for exactly as long as it took me to raise the camera — and not a second longer.
A natural reserve outside Cambridge
A protected stretch of meadow and old woodland a few minutes south of Cambridge — tall summer grass, wildflowers gone to seed, and a treeline that holds the sun late. Best on a still evening in July or August, an hour before sunset, when the light comes through low and gold and the whole field goes quiet. Park at the main lot; it's a short walk in. Check the reserve's hours, since the gates close at dusk — and the one honest catch is the wind, lovely in photographs and a menace to anything you try to hang, so we bring extra ties for the banner.