My first muse and still my most difficult client to please: my beautiful firstborn daughter, Charlotte.
Since she became a teenager, I can count on one hand the number of times she has willingly let me photograph her. So when she agreed to tag along while I photographed her lifelong best friend Malyn’s senior photos near downtown Durham, I was delighted. Even better, she actually agreed to step in front of the camera herself.
Looking at the timestamps afterwards, I think Charlotte gave me a grand total of about ten minutes. When your subject is your own teenage daughter, you learn to work quickly!
Fortunately, ten minutes was plenty. And I’m pleased to say she actually liked some of the photos, which might be the biggest compliment I’ve received in a while.
Who knows? She may even let me photograph her again someday soon.
Urban Senior Photos in Durham, NC
For Charlotte’s photos, we wandered around a few spots near downtown Durham, using the streets, buildings, textures and available light as our backdrop.
This is exactly the sort of environment I love for senior photography. I’m much more interested in creating something that feels individual to the person I’m photographing than running through a predetermined list of poses.
We can walk, find interesting light, stop when I see a background that works and generally let things evolve as we go. It keeps the session relaxed and gives us photographs that don’t look like everyone else’s senior pictures.
Senior Pictures With Her Best Friend
At the end of Charlotte’s ten minutes of modelling, I photographed her and Malyn together.
They’ve been best friends practically their entire lives, so it was lovely to get some photographs of the two of them together at this particular point in their lives.
After Charlotte was officially released from modelling duties, Malyn and I headed over to Duke Gardens to continue her senior session. That gave us a completely different look from the more urban Durham photographs we’d started with.
I’ll share more from Malyn’s session soon.
Raleigh & Durham Senior Photography
I’ve been photographing people around Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill for years, but I’m really enjoying doing more senior photography.
Senior sessions give me many of the same things I love about photographing weddings: interesting people, different locations and the freedom to make photographs that actually have some personality.
And senior pictures certainly don’t have to mean standing in a field smiling at the camera.
We can shoot among the streets and architecture of downtown Raleigh or Durham, find somewhere a little grittier and less polished, use somewhere beautiful like Duke Gardens, or combine completely different locations during the same session.
The idea is to create senior portraits that look and feel like you, rather than trying to make you fit a particular style.
Looking for a Raleigh Durham Senior Photographer?
If you’re looking for a senior photographer in Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill or elsewhere around the Triangle, please give me a shout.
Whether you want something urban, artistic, natural, elegant or a mixture of all of them, we can build the session around your personality and the kinds of photographs you actually want.
And yes, parents — I’ll happily photograph siblings and best friends together as part of the session too.
Senior sessions are a lot of fun. Even, apparently, when I only get ten minutes with my own daughter.
