There are certain pictures I think every senior deserves to have. The class portraits. The pretty outfit. The perfect location. The photos Mom will frame and eventually pull back out when graduation announcements start going in the mail.
I love these photos. There is a reason so many of my seniors choose to use their first session for exactly that. But when I walk to my seniors about their second session, I usually challenge them to think about it a little differently.
What do you want to remember about who you were during your senior year?
Not just what you looked like. What did you love? What took up your time? What were you proud of? Where did you spend your Friday nights? What was the thing your friends knew you for?What part of your life right now would immediately take you back to being 17 or 18 if you saw a photograph of it twenty years from now?
Because those are the things I want to help you remember. Your senior year deserves a story.
One of my seniors is completely remodeling a truck. It's something he has put his own time and work into, and it is important to him. So we have talked about building his second session around it! Another wants to use hers to document her senior prom.
And I LOVE both ideas.
Neither one has to fit the traditional ideas of what a senior portrait session is "supposed" to look like. That is kind of the point. The goal is to get creative and document something that feels like you. Maybe that is your truck. Maybe it is your dance studio, the football field you've spent four years on, your instrument, your favorite coffee shop, your horse, your best friends, or the place you've spent a million afternoons after school. Maybe it's getting dressed up for senior prom. It just has to matter to you.
Because eventually, the ordinary things won't feel so ordinary.
I think that's the part that's easy to forget while you are living it. Senior year is full of lasts, but most of them don't announce themselves when they're happening.
One day you'll go to your last practice. You'll drive home from school for the last time. There will be one final Friday night with the same group of friends, one last performance, one last competition and one last getting ready for a school dance.
And then life moves forward.
Years from now, you might be sitting with old friends laughing about high school. You might have a family of your own pulling out old pictures and asking what you were like at their age.
And I hope these photos can help you answer that.
I hope you can look at them and remember the people you loved, the things you spent your time doing, the places that felt like home, and all those little pieces of life that seemed completely normal at the time. That's the beautiful thing about photographs. They give us a way to hold onto a moment long after we have moved past it.
Those are the pictures I want you to have.
And I have to give this year's seniors some credit. They have absolutely understood the assignment! I have loved hearing the ideas they are coming up with for their sessions, and I already know we are going to create some really special things together this year.
Class of 2028, I'm already thinking about you too. I'll be opening more senior spots next spring, and I can't wait to see what we come up with together!
