Here's how we like to personalize High School Senior portraits.

winstonwolfe (71)in #photography • 7 years ago (edited)

This is Kayle (like Kay-lee). She was one of the high school seniors we took portraits of a couple of years ago.
She was hoping we'd be able to personalize her portrait by including her 2 main interests: Books & Dancing

The books were no problem at all, but the dancing seemed as though it might cause some issues since we don't shoot in a studio to get the particular high-contrast lighting one might associate with a ballet dancer's portrait.

So we came up with a plan to mesh the two worlds together in a sort of Harry Potter-esque scene where Kayle would strike a dancer's pose in the middle of a grassy field while reading her favorite book and being swarmed by other flying books.

When we met at our agreed-upon location, we first took a few photos of Kayle with just her books (actually she brought only a few of them, the rest were a bunch of my father's old books we used as props). These shots turned out pretty well.

Then, for the flying-books photo, we took several poses of Kayle striking her dancer's pose. Once we captured one that we felt would be a great candidate for this composite, we then began taking photos of the "flying books" by tossing a variety of my father's books into the air and snapping as many different pics as we could of them flapping around while in mid flight.

Once we got back to the house to begin editing, I had the idea to have an arch of flying books rather than just randomly placed ones. So we photographed a small stack of books on the grass in front of a green screen in our backyard to superimpose onto the ground next to her in the field. Personally, I think the final image turned out nicely.