09 Feb The Last 2011 Senior
Say what?! Senior pictures… this time of year? Yep. About a week ago, I captured, what I can safely say, will be my last senior picture session for the graduating class of 2011. Emily, a senior this year, works on the yearbook staff (I guess a perk is that you can submit your photo SUPER late – I tease, Emily), and with great responsibility comes… great procrastination? I don’t know, and didn’t care, cause all it means is that I got to have another fun senior photo shoot.
We shot in and around my Tacoma studio. Speaking of perks, one of the major perks of my studio location is being a part of a large group of work spaces located inside of a large antique mall. Three floors of really cool, old “stuff.” (Ok, not trying to hijack my own blog post here, but I’m in a coffee shop writing this right now and a 50 year old dude just walked in, and he is rockin’ a seriously large mullet. What’s the deal with that? People, come on. Joe Dirt called, he wants his mullet back, and even he said that mullets are out right now. Ok, sorry, I’ll focus, back to the post). Anyways, the studio and the surrounding space is filled with all kinds of shooting possibilities, and a huge reason why I selected this as my studio location. Not to mention it is right in the middle of downtown Tacoma, so walking outside the doors puts you in some serious metro shooting locations, including a graffiti garage I frequent, all within walking distance.
With the constantly changing of colors, textures, and images of graffiti art, you get a new shooting location on almost a weekly basis. Sometimes a misfit will come around and just tag over good art, it’s kinda a bummer, but… Emily seemed to take a liking to some of the de-facing…
Ok, enough of the graffiti, and on to some cityscapes, and in a giant dress to boot. Emily showed up with a huge plastic bag, which was so large that it looked like a freshly deployed parachute in which she picked up and tried to carry. Inside that larger-than-normal bag (I had to ask, “whatcha got there.”) was a larger-than-normal dress. Poofy… I think is the word, almost Disney princess-like. I dug it, so it became a large focus for our shoot.
Don’t forget, we shot this at the very tail end of January. It was cold, windy, the only thing you could say that we had “going for us” was the fact that is wasn’t raining, and Emily did a great job of at least appearing to not be miserable. With the last click of the downtown shooting, we ran Emily indoors to melt away the goosebumps.
Here we are in one of the unoccupied spaces in the antique mall. The great thing is when new occupants come into one of the spaces, they paint the space again, which gives me more fresh locations to work in, yet not having to go anywhere. It’s a pretty good deal. Some go all out, and the last person to be in this spot painted the floor red!
Boy, this girl is a smiler, for sure. I like to get a couple straight-faced images for the subject to have, and it was a task with Emily! Got a couple though
Onto the library. Yes, the library, muhaha, I love this place. Came up with this idea to have this huge dress all spread out and having Emily sitting down reading a book. Kinda fun.
Ok, finally, we make it into the studio…
Started with some simple black background stuff, then moved to a new outfit and splashed some color on the wall.
And for the grand finale, some fun ones for Emily. Tossed her a flash light, turned all the lights off in the studio, had her write “2011” with the flash light and then I popped the flash. Then one at the very end when we went flash crazy (all one exposure).
More fun to come….