Senior Photo Session with Claire at the Bellevue Botanical Garden

Claire is from Michigan.  She and her mother Sue were going to be in the Seattle area looking at possible schools for Claire after she graduates from high-school next spring.  Claire thought it would be fun to take her senior photos in a location that would be completely different from her classmates, so they did some Googling for Seattle Senior Photographers.  My name kept coming up on their searches, and after looking through some of the samples photos I have posted online they got in touch to see if they could schedule a photo session while they were in Seattle.

Fortunately Claire had a pretty flexible schedule for the schools she was visiting, and we were able to find a date that would work for everyone.  After discussing the various options for locations for the session we decided on the Bellevue Botanical Gardens.  This is one of my absolute favorite locations for portrait sessions of all types in the Seattle area in almost any time of the year, and it offers a wide range of photo possibilities.

Our Session at the Botanical Garden

We met at the entrance to the park on a gorgeous sunny August afternoon.  Claire had brought a change of clothes with her, so we discussed the strategy to maximize our time in the park while making sure we got plenty of photos with both outfits.  I soon discovered that she was a natural model who could strike a variety of poses with little or no instruction.  This is not the norm when working with high-school seniors and it was fun to see what she could come up with on her own while adding some minor directions to allow us to best take advantage of the lighting.

Claire had brought a very cool hat with her, and right away we started playing with different possibilities of ways to use it in the photos.  Claire’s natural posing talent was instantly apparent as she moved through different poses.  We started with photos in a shady area, and quickly moved out into the garden area and full sunlight.  Bright light is much more difficult both for the photographer and subject.  The high contrasts can make properly exposing photos tricky, and bright sunlight can cause the subject to squint if he/she is not oriented correctly.  Claire caught on to this very quickly and I needed to do very little coaching once I had her in a good location.

The Suspension Bridge

After the garden area we slowly made our way deep into the park, down a forested path.  Our ultimate goal was the suspension bridge at the far end of the park, a feature that is unique to this park.  It is more than a pretty good distance from the park entrance, and since we were stopping whenever we spotted a good place for photos it took awhile to finally get there.  I had purposely scheduled the timing of our session so the sun would be in the right position when we reached the bridge.   My timing worked perfectly, and we had fantastic backlighting to work with while at the bridge.  Somehow we even hit a spell when there were very few other park visitors at the bridge while we were there, and we were able to get a great selection of photos before we finally made our way back to the park entrance.

I’ve included some of the photos from our session that you will find below.  I hope that you enjoy them, and please feel free to leave some comments!