Senior Portrait Design Consultations

Great portraits don’t just happen because someone points a camera in your direction.  That may be a picture, a snapshot more likely, but it’s only by chance if it comes out more than something mediocre.

As our name says, our goal is to DESIGN the series of senior portraits we create for you.

And the design process starts with a senior picture design consultation.  It’s during this consultation that we learn everything we need to about you, and then make some specific plans as to how and where we’ll create your senior portraits. 

Be prepared for a lot of questions.  Some of them are pretty easy to answer, like “what do you plan to do after high school”.  Some are harder, like “If we want your friends to exclaim “THAT’S SO YOU” when they see what we’ve created together, what would they have to see to make them say that?”

I’ve had people tell me they felt like they’d been to a counseling session, but that simply means I’m trying to get inside your head just a little bit in order to really understand your personality, your style, your dreams, your passions, your aspirations. 

We’ll talk about the elements of your personality and style that really define who you are.  We’ll talk about what you like to wear, and discuss clothing.

We’ll talk about what you want out of your session, as well as what your parents want (after all, they’re typically paying for all this)

We’ll find out if there are any specific places that we might want to photograph you.  For example, we recently had a young lady who loved to read and loves books, so I took her to a little bookstore that’s so small you don’t enter it, you wear it.  It’s full of character not to mention stacks and piles of old books, so it was the perfect place to photograph this aspect of her personality.

We’ll find out if there are any aspects of you that people automatically identify with you.  Another example, last year we had a young

lady named Ashley who’s moms said is so prone to what they call “Ashleyisms”.  Then she proceeded to tell me about the time she called her dad and said her car just mysteriously quit running as she was driving down the highway.

Turns out she’d run out of gas, but never even thought of that as a possibility.  So for the fun of it, we recreated that situation in her pictures, and her family LOVED it.  “That’s SO ASHLEY” her mom said when she saw it.

Not everyone has something this specific, but at the very least we’l explore the elements of your personality and I’ll have a much better sense of how to photograph you.

Then we’ll come up with a general plan as to where we’ll photograph you. This may be specific places, and specific themes, or it may be simply a general idea.

But because of this process, no two sessions are ever the same, and everyone gets a unique set of senior portraits created of them.

One more thing.  I have always challenged myself to make sure each person is photographed in a place or in a manner that I’ve never done before.  That keeps things fresh,exciting and challenging for me, and makes sure  that you’re getting  something that no one before has ever had. 

Consultations generally last about an hour, and during that time, we’ll go through more details of our Senior Catalog, so you can get an idea of some of the possibilities for the end results.