“And suddenly you know… It’s time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.”
I’m a pretty strong extrovert. This may or may not be obvious, depending on the circumstances of how you meet me, but I definitely prefer being around people and am not huge on quiet time. But for some reason, the exception to that is that I do enjoy the time before my sessions. I always show up to a location for a shoot pretty early. I’ve sometimes said that I do that to scope out the place, but that’s not completely accurate because I still show up early when it’s a location that I know like the back of my hand.
Even if I’m very familiar, I still like to walk around and look at the light..light is always changing. And since I consider light to be the most important element to my “backgrounds” it’s important to take a look. I’m a light chaser, always looking for interesting things the sun is doing. So a lot of the time on my walks around a location, I’m looking at the light.
But also, I’m thinking about my session…who am I about to photograph? What part of him or her or them do I want to capture? What is important about this time period that the client wants to remember? For my family sessions, my goal is to capture interactions and emotion between family members. With senior sessions, that’s different because there is typically only one person. So the interaction is between me and my camera, and the subject. Hannah made that so easy because she was such a joy to talk to and get to know. She’s graduating next week from Independence High School, and even though this is the first time we met, I feel so proud of her and happy for her to begin this next stage in her life. Her parents can be very proud to have raised such a lovely young woman.
So I guess that I enjoy this quiet time before the session because I don’t feel quite alone…I feel that it’s the first step in getting to know my client…imagining where they’ve been, where they are going and what these photos might mean to them. I hope that these photos mark the beginning of a wonderful adventure for Hannah, wherever she may go. Congrats to Hannah and to the entire class of 2018.
