Seniors 2012 - Kacie

Kacie's senior session was, no lie, one of the most fun I've had, and I love doing senior pictures.  They're all fun to me, but Kacie's was awesome.  I've photographed her sister before - for senior portraits awhile back and during my beauty shoot this summer (was it summer?  Spring?  No, summer.  I'm so bad with time....).  For Kacie's shoot, like Alex's, I went to their house, which is amazing.  They have all this land and beautiful scenery.  Normally my senior shoots have the studio shots first and then outdoors, but we switched it up and did the outside ones first.

The thing I really love about doing senior shoots is going somewhere that the person is comfortable and wants to be.  Not just "oh, look, this is my studio and the places I already have set up."  No.  It's so much more interesting to go and photograph in someone's natural environment.  Not only are they more comfortable, the images will be unique to them.  No one else will have pictures on that porch swing, with those flowers in the background.  Just Kacie.  And that's really cool to me.

For the studio shots, I set up in their living room with a similar lighting pattern as I used for Drew's portraits last week.  (Note: I am very proud of my lighting here, especially in this first image where she has on a white shirt.  White shirt + white background + good seperation = win.)  The beauty dish was more to the front than side, and the hair light closer to the background, but it was very similar.  The shoot, however, was very different.  Because we were having fun and Kacie's entire wardrobe was in the house, she changed a few times, grabbed hats and scarves and the camera clicked away for a bit longer than expected.  When she becomes a model for Abercrombie, I told her, she better give them my name!

Seniors 2012 - Allie

Let's go back about...14 years.  I was almost 10 years old, starting 5th grade at a new school.  I made one friend, her name was Whitney.  She remained my closest friend for years after that.  We had fights, like everyone does, but we were friends for 11 years, until the day she died in a car wreck, engaged to my cousin's cousin.

Whitney had a niece, Alison, who went to pre-school with my brother when we started at that new school.  I haven't seen her since the funeral nearly 3 years ago, but she asked me to do her senior portraits.  I was honored to, because when I was younger, this was my second family and I missed them.

Because my air conditioning is broken and it's been REALLY hot lately, I took my backdrop setup to Allie's house for yearbook portraits.

After that we went to Ambridge High School and took some photos of Allie in her letterman jacket and band jacket.  She plays the piccolo, which I'm not really sure I spelled right....  It was pretty cool, I had my 75-300mm lens on and stood in the stands while she was out in the middle of the football field.  Definitely different.

We hit up one more place after that, a park a few minutes from the high school.  There was a gazebo there and I broke out my manual focus, 50mm, f2 lens.  GORGEOUS!!!

So yeah.  Super psyched to see Allie and her mom again, super psyched about how pretty her pictures turned out, it was all around a really good shoot!