A golden hour motherhood session in Dickson Park
Motherhood · Cambridge · Summer 2026
A whole year of photographing him, and hardly a single picture of the two of them together. This was that picture.
The session
Alina & Timofii
Alina had been Timofii's photographer for his entire first year — hundreds of pictures on her phone, and almost none with her in them. This was their first session together, the first time anyone had put the two of them in the same frame instead of Alina holding the camera at arm's length. She came in a cream linen dress, a little nervous. Timofii came in matching linen and bare feet, and had no nerves at all.
We met in Dickson Park an hour or so before sunset, on the big open lawn under the old trees, where the evening light comes in soft and low and everything goes a quiet green-gold. I barely directed them. I'd suggest a blanket or a patch of grass and then just watch — Timofii practising his wobbly steps while he held on to her fingers, collapsing on top of her in the grass, laughing with his whole head thrown back until she was laughing too. Near the end he got hungry, and she fed him right there on the lawn. It was the stillest the whole hour got.
The frame I keep coming back to is that one — Alina standing in the last of the light, Timofii curled into her arms with his bare feet hanging over her elbow, her eyes on him and nowhere else. There were a lot of emotions in that hour, most of them hers. But that's the photograph that says it. Not a mother posing with her son. Just a mother, finally in the picture.
About ten minutes in, she stopped thinking about the camera. That's when the photographs started looking like them.
Dickson Park, Cambridge
A big, open city park in Cambridge — wide mown lawns, mature trees around the edges, and a covered pavilion if the weather turns. Best in the hour before sunset from late spring to early autumn, when the trees soften the light and the grass is still green. The ground is flat and forgiving, which matters when your model is still learning to walk. The one honest drawback is that it's a well-loved public park, so summer evenings can get busy — we pick a weekday and a far corner of the lawn.