Senior portraits - Two beautiful girls having fun in front of the camera

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we are deep into graduation mode at our house, and many of our friends are in the same mode. This has been a busy time for us, going out and capturing images of the our close friends kids who are graduating from high school.

For this particular senior portrait session, we were shooting images of our good friends CJ and Jenna. Both of them are graduating from the same school and attending Santa Clara University in the fall.

We started with CJ at one of our local parks. I like to find spots where I have a dark background, so that the viewer is not distracted from my subject. For this shot, I used my Canon 1DX with the 70-200 lens at f2.8 and also added a little bit of on-camera flash (turned down by one stop).

CJ was willing to climb out to this rock for this photo, and I am really glad that we took this.

Then it was Jenna's turn to be in front of the camera. This photo was taken at the same park, but I purposely found different locations for Jenna, since I did not want her and CJ to have portraits in the exact same spots.

While I was shooting images of Jenna, my wife walked around and scouted some other possible locations. She came across this small table behind a nearby store, which really worked out great.

For this shot, on a bridge at the park, I got down low and close to the railing and shot this at f2.8. Using this aperture is ideal for a shot like this, since the foreground and background are out of focus, but Jenna is perfectly sharp.

Once we had the individual portraits completed, it was time to photograph the girls together. My wife (who is the truly artistic one in the family) decided that we needed a "2013" sign for them to hold. We looked at some local stores but did not like what we found. My wife decided to paint a piece of wood with chalkboard paint and then wrote 2013 with different colored chalk. Very clever and it worked out great.

Near the park, I found this great pathway. We asked the girls to walk away from us while I shot images of them, and then we asked them to come back towards us. I did not ask them to do this pose, all I asked was "How does it feel to be almost done with high school?" and this was their reaction.

CJ decided to change to another outfit and we took some more individual photos of her.

I helped both girls into my "favorite tree" in this park to take some more fun shots. I have photographed many people in this tree and always like the results. I think my record is a family of 5 up there in that small spot! :)

Jenna's mom had her Canon Rebel with her and shot this image of me and the girls after we had finished the session.

After all the images were retouched and ordered, I decided to try something fun for each family. I created a 2013 template in Adobe Photoshop and then added images (using clipping paths on each layer) for each character.

For their combined graduation party, I printed these 19" wide on Epson Velvet Fine Art paper on my Epson R2000 and brought them as gifts. I had fun experimenting with these and the families loved them!