Ella is a high school senior and I had the privilege of photographing her senior portraits on an extremely warm (!) fall evening. She handled the extreme heat and the garden variety bugs like a champ. The light and the wildflowers cooperated quite nicely and we had a great time! Ella is sweet, passionate, fun, and loves cats and dogs (my kind of person). Her mother claims that she’s existed entirely on carbs up to this point (which I can definitely relate to), and we also have tuxedo cats and an older sister in common. She also loves pizza, but she’s a pineapple-on-pizza type of girl so I have to draw our pizza comparisons to an end there. She’s skilled at sports and played softball for most of her education, but now she’s looking forward to a profession in nursing in order to help people. I can’t wait to see what Ella does in the future! I grabbed a few shots of her sister Claire and mom Susan toward the end – such a fun bunch who came along to support Ella and give her reminders of mac and cheese as she posed.

I used to get a ton of requests for high school senior portrait photography that I had to turn down due to our wedding schedule, but now that I’ve switched over to portraiture, I’m so happy that I get to take a bunch of these seniors on! It’s SO fun to work with them and talk to them about the future, and Jackson was no exception. Jackson’s graduating high school this spring, and is moving on to college at Appalachian State University. He considered a lot of different schools before deciding on App because of its different landscape and beautiful campus. In high school, he’s enjoyed playing trumpet in marching band (I am a fellow marching band kid, so I appreciated this greatly!) and trying out a ton of Durham’s restaurants, particularly the authentic Mexican restaurants that he loves. It was so much fun getting to know Jackson and I know he’ll have the best time at App State!

Karen+Co.

Senior portraits are something we don’t get the chance to do that often, but they are FUN. Especially when you get impressive seniors and they can teach you things like how you should engage your core while climbing on dangerous playground equipment in order to take their photographs, and how you should also probably stabilize your feet better. Karen came all the way to Sante Fe to have her senior pictures taken with us! Well, not really, but kind of? She came with her sister Anna to visit their Uncle Glenn and Aunt Kathy. And Aunt Kathy happens to be Kathy White Swope, who works with the always amazing Sally Oakley to form an unstoppable team of wedding planners here whom we love very much. So Aunt Kathy recommended us to do Karen’s senior portraits and Karen was on board and the dream was born. And by “dream” I mean a plan was hatched to have a place where Karen could hang upside down while I took her pictures.

Karen is in the circus (!!!) and also does fencing (!!!) and is generally impressive and fabulous. She can climb and hang upside down and has a lot of upper arm strength and obviously a stable core accompanied by good foot placement. She also has a great sense of humor (as does Anna, Kathy, and Glenn) and we all had a bit of fun running around Pullen Park in Raleigh (and later in Mordecai, where Kathy and Glenn were married). We also took pictures of Awesome Younger Sister Anna, who had no qualms about sitting in tree caves or trying to get her older sister attacked by ducks (as a younger sister who has an older sister who is also nervous around fowl of all types, I did find this humorous). And we also took pictures of Uncle Glenn and Aunt Kathy because of COURSE since they set this up and accompanied us and helped immensely. It was a good time. Sparklers were lit but not by Kathy because she deserves just one day off from lighting sparklers and she actually got to use them for once instead of trying to give a bunch of wedding guests directions and trying not to get caught on fire. It was a grand ole time. We were so lucky to be able to work with this whole crew, and we wish the best of luck to our outstanding senior Karen – Class of 2018!