Your Kid Thinks Senior Pictures Are Cringe. So Did I.
For the parent who brought it up at dinner and got a look. A senior photographer in Orange County on why the eye roll is fair, and what actually changes it.
You already know how this went. You brought it up at dinner, you got a look, and now you're the one on your phone at 11pm trying to figure out whether senior pictures are worth the fight.
They're not wrong to be suspicious. Picture what they're picturing. A blazer that belongs to nobody in the house. Hair gel borrowed off their sister. The mustache that was looking so promising in April, gone that morning by request. Then twenty minutes of standing next to a tree, hair doing something only their mother can explain, wearing a grin they have never once made in real life. It reads like a costume, because it is one. If that were the pitch, I'd roll my eyes too.
A note from Daniel
I was a terrible student. I took photography in high school and skipped most of the actual coursework, because I was too busy shooting my friends skateboarding. I grew up in Phoenix going to punk shows. I moshed, I crowd surfed, I stage dived, and I outran a few too many security guards with my skateboard.
I was never the kid who wanted his picture taken. I was the kid standing at the edge of the thing he actually cared about, with a camera.
That's the part that ended up mattering. I'm not going to ask your senior to be someone else for an hour. I have a lot of patience for a teenager who only really cares about one thing, because I was one.
The session
We build it around them, not around me
This is the part that changes the answer at dinner. The session isn't a look I picked out and handed to your kid. It's built on what they're into.
If they surf, we shoot where they surf. Skate, we go to the park they've been at every day since ninth grade. Music, we're in the practice room or the record store they've been walking to since freshman year. The trail, the field, the studio, the diner everyone ends up at after practice.
If they can picture it, we can usually shoot it.
Not what I think is rad.
What they think is rad.
That's the whole idea, and it's why the eye roll usually stops once they realize they're the one choosing.
Two ways
The two ways this can go
I.
The focused one
The Main Character
One location, one outfit, one hour. We shoot at the end of the day, when the light gets low and warm and gold and turns an ordinary street into something worth standing in.
It's simple and it moves. Cap and gown frames are yours if you want them.
II.
The whole production
The Origin Story
More locations, more outfits, more of what they do. This is the one for a senior with a thing, and it goes wherever that thing lives.
Either way, it's a collaboration. They tell me what they're into, I bring the light, the ideas and a little direction, and we make something together that they'll actually want to send to people.
Where to start
What to do tonight
Let them pick the place. That one move flips this from something happening to them into something they're deciding, and it tells me more about how to shoot them than any questionnaire will. You handle the calendar, they handle the where, and we'll make sure they've sorted out the wardrobe well before the day.
Orange County Senior Sessions
If your senior is graduating this year and you'd rather not spend three months negotiating.
Check Your DateDaniel
