about

My name is Sarah Wilde. I am a photographer, an engineer, a runner, and a surfer living in California with my fiancé and our three cats.


Here you’ll find my favorite digital photos and film scans in their high-resolution glory: I shoot on Fuji XS-20, Canon AE-1, Rollei 35-AF, and Rolleiflex TLR.

recent posts

    • Catching up and settling in

      A lot of life has happened since Costa Rica, and as nostalgic as I am for the blogosphere of the early 2000’s, I had been dreading diving into the housekeeping that comes with cataloging and editing the photos I made along the way. I purchased my personal laptop in 2020 and it served me well for years: a rose gold 2018 powerhouse of a MacBook Air. She is enjoying her twilight years, which is good for her, but meant it took *minutes* to edit a single photo in Lightroom, and hours to get things moving quickly enough that I could upload them to WordPress. After beginning the slog this week, Eli encouraged me (and eventually insisted) that I send my rose gold girl out to her final rest and invest in a new laptop. And here we are!!! Not spending hours on tasks that can take minutes!!!

      After Costa Rica, December was quiet but full of warmth: family visits, holiday cookie parties, a cozy Carmel Christmas Eve, and then ripping our 2026 through the doorway from the threshold. January and February were packed to the brim: Washington, Tahoe, a quick stolen NYC trip with 16 inches of snow, Austin to see my favorite humans and the life I said “until next time” to, back to Tahoe, Big Sur, Carmel. New Mexico to introduce my parents to Eli’s parents: Santa Fe to sink into Georgia O’Keefe and feeling hot sunshine and brisk desert air at the same time. Dillon Beach, Santa Cruz.

      I moved to San Francisco two years ago this past May 4th. Since I was a very young child, I’ve noticed and pursued a fleeting but very real feeling of home, or maybe settlement. This feeling had (and has) distinct textures, features, shimmers: crisp air, blue hour, feeling as though I’m at exactly the right place at exactly the right time. I remember feeling this distinctly in Austin in the Autumn of 2022 while I watched When Harry Met Sally and baked in my kitchen as deep blue stained the evening sky darker and darker. It’s a feeling that is only accessible through stillness, and it is one of my favorite feelings in the world. It has frequently served as my north star, and tells me earnestly that I am in alignment with myself. I finally feel settled enough in my San Francisco life to access this feeling regularly: standing in the sun on our back patio with the palm trees and purple flowers, sitting in bed drinking Sightglass coffee, seeing the sun hit the disco ball in the living room and transforming the space into wall to wall magic. I feel it, and it is glorious.

      Let’s move backwards in time:

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    • Costa Rica

      Costa Rica

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    • A week in Chicago

      A week in Chicago

      Eli and I spent a week in Chicago in early November. Neither of us had been, and we didn’t have any expectations. I was attending a conference, and being able to explore the city was a happy side-effect.

      The week was full of surprises: the weather was much warmer than we expected, we didn’t love deep dish pizza, and we were obsessed with the architecture boat tour. Another fun, unexpected element of the week was the warmth of truly everyone that we encountered when we were there.

      I was born in Southern Illinois, but grew up in the Northeast where there is a different flavor of direct, amusing connectedness in the people that live there. The way I describe Midwesterners is that they possess a happy assumption that of course two people in the same room, or the same car, would be engaged in conversation — being strangers is irrelevant to that assumption. That implicit openness and eagerness to start a conversation is not present in most parts of the Northeast that I’ve lived in, and certainly not the Bay Area. That doesn’t mean that spontaneous conversations don’t happen — but that if they do, I’ve often been the instigator or the driver of the conversation.

      I love the Midwestern openness that we experienced, and I was utterly charmed by Chicago. The downtown urban core is dense, the train system is sprawling, and the river that runs through the city is magnetic, drawing locals, tourists, restaurants, and energy towards the vibrant riverwalk. The city is also steeped in history, and home to buildings and museums that began to feel like they had their own personalities (surely thanks to our riverboat tour guide). We’ll certainly be back.

      Our favorite places were: Pizza Lobo (bar-style pizza that I cannot recommend enough), The Art Institute, and the lakefront. We ran down the lakefront to the University of Chicago campus on our last morning there: the air was crispy, the leaves were gloriously gold and orange, and I could picture my mom in the ’70’s at her alma mater, rushing to an Economics class and feeling like Chicago was the center of the universe.

      More photos below:

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