Madison – Streator Senior Photos
Comin’ at ya with another beautiful senior today!! Madison is our Streator area senior photo rep and she did a fabulous job!
You’ll notice this is a lengthy blog post – it was a lengthy session – because it was a pretty special occasion for us. It was the first time we had an apprentice shooting with us! For this session, Nora, an 11-year-old from Streator and an aspiring photographer, came along on our shoot to learn the ropes and see how a photo shoot happens.
I heard that Nora was a fan of ours and had been following our blog (Yay! We love blog fans! But Nora, please wait until you’re 18 to start using the f-word as much as I do. K? K.) and then I heard that Nora wrote an essay for school about what career she wants to pursue when she’s older. She wrote about wanting to be a photographer! So we were super excited to ask her to join us on a photo shoot.
Before our shoot I got to check out the essay and I have to say, I was pretty impressed by how much she already understood about becoming a photographer, what it would take to be a good one, and what challenges come with the job. Oh how I love big dreams grounded in reality!!
A lot of the other students’ essays (they were published in a book) mentioned being sports stars or business people of various sorts. All fine choices. But I tell ya what Nora, keep working and you’ll be the only one signing your own paychecks while working from home in your yoga pants. (All my photog friends are nodding in agreement right now, because there’s nothing a creative person loves more than being supervisor-free and working in lazy clothes.)
Anyway… We got Nora all set up with gear, taught her how to work the camera and then we pretty much threw her in the deep end! She worked super hard, learned way more than I thought she would even be ready to understand AND pumped out a ton of awesome images! Stayed tuned to see them at the end.
First…let’s get a look at the beautiful Madison…
So much pretty!!
Okay you’ll see in the next set Madison is sitting in the grass. Well, originally I asked her to sit on the sidewalk. I even made a point of telling Nora that good photographers always check things out before asking their clients to do anything. So I showed her that we wanted to make sure there wasn’t broken glass or anything else on the sidewalk before we asked Madison if she was okay with having a seat.
Sidewalk was clear, Madison was game, so she sat down. And then she screamed. And I nearly died. I thought for sure she’d found some shard of glass that I’d missed and I was going to have this poor apprentice accompanying me to the hospital while we got Madison’s read end stitched up. Thankfully-ish, it wasn’t glass. But it was A LOT of burrs. A LOT. Many dozens. They were the same color as the grass/weeds, so we’d totally missed them. But Madison’s bum had not missed them. Her mama had to scrape them off of her with her keys! But look at her pulling off the next photos…total trooper. Streator girls are always bad asses like that.
I’m completely obsessed with all of these images from an abandon car wash! That’s why there are like 100 of them. Because I couldn’t narrow them down.
You did such an awesome job, Madison! Streator Seniors – if you know Madison talk to her about the details of scheduling your own session and how to save some cash! And Streator seniors…please be warned that we have only a handful of openings left between now and the end of September. Get in touch soooon!!!
Now let’s get a look at Nora’s work. I was majorly impressed you guys!! There were so many good ones, but I narrowed them down to these few that were like, really, really good. It was so fun to go through Nora’s pictures, you could literally see them getting better and see her applying each lesson we taught her.
Um, this next one. Seriously. I’m not pulling your leg. The 11-year-old holding a DSLR for the first time took this.
Nora – I hope you enjoyed your first photo shoot!! You rocked it!
Keep practicing, keep learning, work super hard, pay your dues and stay humble.
Learn what inspires you and, pretty please, don’t let it be Pinterest. Listen to songs, read books, day dream. Then imagine what those things look like. Then go make original images. I promise you that you have a real talent for doing this. You totally do not need to copy what someone else has already done.
Study super hard. Forever. And not just your camera. Study people, study psychology, study sociology, study business. Photography is more than art. (It’s okay if you don’t know how to say ‘sociology’ or know what it is. Just print this out and save it for when you’re a senior in high school. If you still want to be a photographer, it will be helpful then.)
And when other people tell you that having a creative job seems scary and hard, (and they will.) ignore them. It is scary. It is hard. But if you want it, you can handle it. Ain’t nobody more prepared to handle it than a solid Streator girl ;)
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