Planning your senior session: the style behind your portraits — Creative Minneapolis Wedding Photography by Alyssa Lund Photography

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the secrets of planning an engagement session with a distinctive style. If you haven’t read that, here’s a link to it, but I’ll also give you a hint: the secret to a distinctive, personality-filled session bursting with style? It’s honestly so simple it’s hardly a secret: you just need to take time to actually do some planning!

In my engagement-session-style post, I listed a handful of questions that I guided engaged couples through, helping them think through their goals for the portraits, defining their personal style, and pondering how to infuse that style into their session. We can do that for your too.

As a senior in high school, I bet you’ve got a style that’s totally you. 100% unique.

And let me be clear: style can come across in your clothing choices, but it’s about so much more than that—your personality, your passions, your favorite hobbies, your happiest memories…you’re unique and amazing, and capturing your awesome-ness is really what your senior session is all about.

So, let’s get started! I’ve got seven simple questions for you—go through them all and take a minute to actually think through your answer for each of them. The process of doing this now will give you so many ideas for what you want to showcase in your senior portraits. Bonus points if you print this off and bring it in to your session-planning appointment with me!

Question #1: Have you thought about your intention for your portrait session? What do you want the images to convey and how do you want to use them? This is something that we’ll talk about at our session-planning meeting with you and your parents, and I care about each of your responses to this question! If you’re not sure what I mean by talking about the “intention” for your session, you should check out a two-part blog post that I wrote about session intentions—here is part one and here is part two.

Question #2: Tell me a few of your favorite things to do! These can be organized clubs through school, quirky traditions or routines that you and your family do together, your favorite things to do with your friends on the weekends, anything. I’m not looking for a professional resume here or anything—just what makes you happy!

Question #3: Now, pick at least three words to describe your personal style. This might feel weird at first, but once you start thinking about it I bet you’ll come up with a bunch! (Think: are you laid-back, earthy, dramatic, classic, polished, active, a hopeless romantic, preppy, creative, vintage-inspired, funky, colorful, etc.?)

Question #4: This time, I want to hear from your parents! Moms/Dads, if you had to choose five words to describe your senior’s personality, what would you say?

Question #5: What are three of your favorite memories?

Question #6: What are three of your favorite places in the world? These can be far-off places you’ve traveled to, or your regular booth at your favorite coffee shop.

Question #7: Plan a perfect day for yourself! If you had a free Saturday and could do absolutely anything, how would you spend your time? Feel free to be as detailed as you like here—what would you eat? Where would you go? Who would you see? How would you get around?

Hey, you’ve made it through to the end! Awesome. Now, if you look back through your notepage or Google doc (or if you didn’t write this down, just reflect on your thoughts/answers to these questions), I bet you’ll notice some themes that will define your personal style—with that in mind, it’s super easy to translate that to focus on what we want to capture in your images, what kind of clothing you might want to bring with, ideas for session locations, and what you’ll want to do with the images after the session.

Now that you’ve come up with your answers for these, bring them along to our session-planning appointment! We’ll hammer out the details for senior portraits and figure out how we can creatively capture the amazing person that you are. I’ll see you then : )

Thanks for reading! Are you interested in learning more about Alyssa Lund Photography and my work with high school seniors? Give me a call at 763-843-2541 or shoot me an email at info@alyssalundphotography.com, or click on the "contact" tab above, and we'll get in touch, share ideas, and I can give you the low-down on how it works!