Brook’s senior portraits are all about fashion and flowers.  She is a great girl from a very nice family - all of whom came to her photo shoot.  And when my lighting assistant ran off to play in the fountains at West Glen with Brook’s little sister (it’s hard to find good help for 50 cents an hour :), Brook’s dad stepped right in and helped us create some great images.  Thanks Steve!

Samantha was so stunning in her blue dress and the gardens in and near her home in Wilmington provided such a great setting that I could have photographed her all day.  Samantha is currently in Ireland for a few weeks so we thought we would share a sneak peak of her previews.

Maddie is a great girl with some special friends.  In fact, half of our session was dedicated to creating traditional and lifestyle portraits of Maddie with her best friends and family which led to the creation of one of my all-time favorite fun friend images around the fire pit in Maddie’s back yard.  The second half of our session was at a state park on the Brandywine river, whose name still escapes me and which I could probably not find again if I tried.  Anyway, the pedestrian bridge crossing the Brandywine spoke to us and led to some interesting and dramatic images.  We didn’t exactly plan our session going for the maximum security look, but we both found all the iron bars and chains and rust inspiring and leading towards more serious and dramatic images.

Danielle literally could have gone anywhere in Iowa for her senior portraits.  She really wanted unique senior portraits and was interested in everything from sports senior portraits to fashion senior portraits to lifestyle senior portraits to nature senior portraits to urban senior senior portraits.  Danielle does more than pretty well in school and in life.   As a reward, Danielle’s mom told her she could go to any studio for her senior portraits and we were delighted to get the call.  Our photo shoot was the classic zig-zag across town chasing locations and light.  We began at the Grand Piano Bistro in Des Moines (www.thegrandpianobistro.com) where the manager was kind enough to allow us to shoot on their piano stage.  After visiting our studio, downtown Des Moines, some dark alleys and bridges, we finally ended up at the capital for some cinderella pictures.  Danielle is a delightful, bright-eyed beauty with a bright future.

We love creating senior portraits in and around seniors’ homes.  Everyone’s home is different and brings elements that are both unique and meaningful to the senior portraits we create.  Seniors are often more relaxed at home than they are in our studio or on location.  Try being yourself when you’re fashion modeling in a busy urban district with dozens of onlookers watching you while they eat their dinners at the local sidewalk bistros.  It can be pretty unnearving.  And the best part about shooting in homes is the seniors have all their stuff their and can typically call upon any outfit I can think of to match an interesting settting.

When is comes to Abby, one of our senior models from Wilmington, Delaware, we needed to go no further than her own back yard for most of our photo shoot.  Her property is adjacent a farm and the fields, hay bales and hedgerow gardens provided most of the scenery for her nature senior portraits.  Abby is a truly beautiful young lady, but even better, she is a makeup artist, which was quite fortunate as we have not yet partnered with a makeup artist in Delaware for our senior portrait clients.  Thanks Abby for showing us what great senior portraits you can create just by staying at home.

Meet Tya - a traveling drum major, doodle-owning, fashionista from Smyrna, Delaware with a Kool-Aid smile.  She’s a high school senior with many interests and really challenged us to capture a wide variety of images in a relatively brief session frequently interrupted by thunderstorms.  Tya’s interest in traveling led us to start at the Wilmington Train Station. While we intended to create some lifestyle images of Tya catching a train, we found the underbelly of the station provided a great setting to capture her second interest - her drums.  Tya has been a Drum Major at Smyrna for the past two years and her passion is the snare drum.  After crawling around on French Street trying to capture the perfect urban drum image and completely covered with dirt and oil, I followed Tya to Rockwood Park where she got her fash on ad played with her doodle (Dante her dachsund-poodle :).  We didn’t intend to shoot sports portrait but we did get to see Tya run the 40 yard dash in about 4 seconds in a dress and heels when a thunderstorm came through the park.