Going into my eighth year of business, there are a lot of things I want to accomplish. Here are just a few:

1. Serve more beautiful families

I want to preserve moments for you in a way that when you look back at them one day, the images will feel like a daydream tugging on your heartstrings.

Your baby’s tiny fingers wrapped around yours. The way your partner looks at your darling children with love. The quiet last days of cradling your belly as you wait for your new little one to arrive. These moments are fleeting and yet so, so important. These are the pages of the story of you.

2. Focus even more on creating lasting family heirlooms

The best way I can serve a family is to capture the details of their love story and then create family heirlooms that will live to tell the tale. Forget about digital files that will become lost on a hard drive 10 years down the road.

Let’s create a gallery wall of your favorite images, so you can enjoy them as you pass by them in your home every day. Let’s begin a collection of archival albums for you to thumb through with your children, and one day your grandchildren.

3. Offer limited edition spring and autumn mini sessions in Rochester, NY

I love to offer the families I work with a quick and easy option for updating their family portraits. Set among the beautiful blossoming trees of Highland Park or the golden, glowing autumn leaves, I’m so excited to host shorter sessions that are less stressful for parents and children alike.

4. Begin curating the perfect client closet

Perhaps the goal I’m most excited for, I’d love to put together options for every member of the family, so that even more of that stress is taken off of your shoulders. Adorable knit newborn sets, flowing pregnancy dresses that catch the sun ever so perfectly, kids cardigan sweaters, and hopefully so much more! I can’t wait to add to the portrait experience and make it that much more easy for every family to have beautiful family pictures.

Jessica Slaunwhite is a newborn and family photographer serving Rochester, NY and Syracuse, NY. She specializes in film photography and finely crafted family heirlooms.

My baby. The sweetest, most loving, and most curious little girl. Most days I can’t believe that I’m the one who gets to call her mine.

I took this portrait of her when she was eight months old. And now she’s almost 10 months old, and I don’t know where the last two months have gone (or the last 10, for that matter).

I love this picture so, so much. I love that I can see the many colors in her eyes, the red tint of her soft, wavy hair, the dimple in her chin (just like her dad), and her chunky little cheeks.

I’m normally partial to lifestyle photography; there’s something special about the in-between, candid moments of life. But a portrait like this is a treasure, in my eyes. It’s a split second of this sweet girl’s life that I’ll want to hang on the wall, send to family members, and pass down through the years. It’s simply timeless.

Jessica Slaunwhite is a northern Virginia film photographer.
She specializes in newborn, parenthood, and family photography.
Jessica is based in Arlington, Virginia, but is available for travel
to destinations near and far.

I’ve never lived in a place like North Carolina, where the ocean is so close that you could visit every day if you wanted. It was my husband’s first duty station in the Marine Corps, and while there were of course some things that we didn’t love about it (I’m talking about the heat!), we enjoyed the adventure that was living on the coast.

Going into this spring, we knew that we would be moving away and that we would miss all of the little things that made living here so special. We started taking ocean walks every chance that we got, in the rain and in the sunshine, when it was chilly and when the wind blew strong. A few of these times, the beach was completely empty. We would walk along and see nobody in either direction looking up and down Emerald Isle.

It was beautiful and peaceful, and I’m so glad that I began bringing my camera along every time. The snapshots that we took in these last few weeks are some of our favorites from all of the years that we lived at Camp Lejeune. Looking at them here from our new and very different home in Arlington, Virginia, we can still feel the salty air on our skin while we searched for shells in the sun, the wet sand beneath our feet on an overcast Sunday morning, and the joy that we felt when our dog ran back and forth at the water’s edge trying to play with the tiny sea birds.

And that feeling, that magical power of a photograph, that is why I love my job.

Emerald Isle, North Carolina / Outer Banks film photographer

Photographer | Jessica Slaunwhite
Film lab | Photovision