Senior Photo shoot

When my daughters were seniors in high school, we decided to do our own photo shoots with the 2 of them, mostly because I love photography and have been taking & composing photos forever, and found this to be a fun challenge to see if I could produce photos "worthy" of senior pics.

When our oldest was a senior, in the autumn of 2001, we used my SLR Olympus OM1 film camera I purchased waaaaay back in 1980----completely manual, no auto focus, a fabulous camera, but everything, from the speed, aperture, and focus had to be set for each photo. We shot one roll of film only (what were we thinking!) and of course it was just the week before the photos were due to the school to be included in the yearbook! (yep, that's how I roll---wait 'til the deadline!) After the film was developed, we thumbed thru all the photos and luckily found one we all LOVED! This was before I knew anything about photo editing on the computer, so what we ended up with was straight out of the camera---no retouching, no changes at all. The biggest challenge we had was cutting the glare from her glasses, so my husband held a sheet of mat board to block that and add a bit of extra reflective lighting when needed. We shot all the photos in our backyard, with some outfit changes for fun. This below was our winner:


In the fall of 2006, when our youngest was a senior I had upgraded to a Canon Rebel TI---but it was still the film version of this camera. She chose to have her photos taken at a wonderful nursery north of town, and after getting permission, spent a fun late afternoon popping around the nursery and taking several rolls of film (smarter this time!). She also had several outfits to change into, and we ended up with a lot more choices we all liked. Yes, it helps to shoot quantity! This time we also played around with some on the computer, converting to black & white, lowering the intensity of color, etc. The one chosen for the yearbook was the one you see below:


Now it's fall 2008 and I have the Canon Rebel TI digital body. My niece was there when we were going through all of my youngest daughters photos, and liked what she saw so we offered to take hers when the time came. That's what we did last Saturday! It was also a lot of fun, even more so using digital and just feeling free to take as many photos as I could, which resulted in almost 250 to choose from!! That's her job and I don't envy her! There were a lot of winners---and I've been having fun playing with them on the computer this week. Before we took the photos I asked her if she had any ideas of what she wanted---any suggestions. The only request she made was that she's seen black and white photos with flowers that have been popped with color and wondered if we could do that. We picked a sunflower and rose from the garden as props to take with us and headed out to a couple of favorite locations around town. Below is one of my favorites I was able to play with and achieve the effect I think she was looking for:



What do you think?