A month and a half ago in mid-October we were contacted by a very sweet mother (Teri) who was looking to get a fall Senior Portrait Session done of her son RIley. We came to find out that Riley is a not only a Senior at Jenny's alma mater high school (St.Joe here in South Bend!), but is the nephew of of Jenny's high school volleyball coach-! It was great chatting with Teri and we sent her our Senior Portrait Guide magazine while we sorted out a date for the upcoming Session. We had Family Portraits to photograph one weekend (one of the two days it didn't rain), a wedding we photographed down in Indianapolis the following weekend (which we stayed down there for for the majority of the 2 weekend days since it was 3 hours away and we worked about 10 hours that Saturday), and then on the following weekend when we'd planned to photograph Riley outside in 3 separate locations for a sunset Session, it rained the entire weekend! Luckily Riley and Teri were flexible, so a few weeks after initial contact from Teri, we were finally successful in finding a non-rainy weekend date (after a morning of work and scheduling around a soccer game that Riley had immediately after his Senior Portrait Session)!
We started Riley's Session here in South Bend at a nice outdoor location at a local college here in town. The leaves during the second week of November were still a bit orange and on the trees, so we were thrilled! The pond was actually frozen since the morning had been relatively cold between 35 and 45 degrees, but we kept the Session lively and then moved Riley indoors for some more photos (and to warm up)!
Next we moved on to the second location on the St. Joseph River here in South Bend. There were some beautiful docks at this second location (that Teri chose from our list of locations) and we think this gave a bit of a rugged, outdoorsy feel, but also a bit of an urban/ city feel since the bridges within the city are cement. This was a nice juxtaposition with the nice, earthy photos from outside at the college's campus, so we were thrilled with the diversity of backdrops for Riley.
While we photographed him, we chatted with Riley about his future. Riley is a bit more stoic, but definitely a determined young man. He has aspirations to become some sort of engineer (he has it narrowed down to 2 fields of concentration) and has a good handful of schools that he's applied to and is looking forward to hearing back from. Riley was a soccer player in high school and is extremely excited to finish up high school and move on to college/ making money and a career.
Riley was an absolute trooper through the cold weather (our 2nd coldest Session from all of 2017!) and it was great getting to know him as well as capture his portraits at this pivotal time in his life. We absolutely love the portraits that we were able to capture of him and hope that he and his family look back at them someday fondly. This is such an exciting and uncertain time in a high school career, but it's nice to step back and capture these memories and moments before Riley heads off to his college of choice and likely lives there for four years before he heads on to his career!
Thank you so much Teri for working with us and coming along for the Session! We really appreciate you two making your way over on the cold day prior to his game. We can't wait to print and deliver Riley's physical photos that he gets with the Senior Portrait Session and we're excited to see what you all choose!
It's always interesting photographing outside in the Midwest, especially up here near Lake Michigan! You never know what the weather it will be day to day. Monday can be 96 degrees and the next day can be 65 degrees and rainy or snowy- literally. We actually do have an indoor studio with a plethora of studio furniture and props, but we just find the outdoors more picturesque and diverse! Plus natural light is fantastic, though we did use a large light on a stand for some of these photos.
Unrelated: We hope you all had a fantastic Thanksgiving last weekend! We spent ours at Jenny's uncle & aunt's house here in South Bend with about 40 relatives (with Jenny's parents in from Arizona to surprise everyone but us)! We've still been eating leftovers well into this week (having just finished most) and we're still not sick of the pumpkin pie! On Friday we attended the wedding of Jenny's high school friend of 16 years (Sarah) at The Brick (beautiful reception venue here in South Bend) and over the weekend we took off to Canada!
Our newest passports came very early (for our trip to Mexico at the start of January), so we decided to head up to Canada which is only a few hours from us and stay there for the weekend! We ate Jenny's favorite poutine at Frenchy's in Windsor, Ontarior, explored a lot of grocery stores and markets, discussed terrorism via an interview on CTV news, got a nice night view of Detroit from Canada, ate a lot of non-American snacks (and brought back a lot of foreign candies), and in general had a good time with the polite people of Canada! Afterward on our way home we stopped at Trader Joe's in Ann Arbor for some of our favorite snacks. We miss TJ's since we were spoiled by it in Ohio and Santa Barbara, California where we previously lived and ran our business, but we don't have a Trader Joe's here in South Bend, Indiana, so this year we've literally been to a Detroit TJ's, a Grand Rapids TJ's, a Columbus (Ohio) TJ's, and now Ann Arbor's TJ's)... AND also on our way home we stopped at nationally renowned Bell's Brewery up in Kalamazoo for a couple of brewery treats to bring home before picking up our dog from Jenny's parents and cooking some of the Trader Joe's goodness for dinner.
We got home this Monday and we've been intensely back working this entire week on packaging and sending out more finished physical wedding albums, physical photo products, etc. while editing recent Portrait Sessions and ONE last wedding of 2017-!! We have about 7 more big packages of photo products to design and send out to clients after they choose their final photos and then a couple more after that. Everything will get us to the end of December before our annual holiday break to visit family out on the West Coast in January-! We're hoping to have time this weekend during the start of December to get some Christmas decorations up, but this late fall has been flying by-! Thanks for checking in and we'll catch ya on the flip side next Wednesday with the Moran Family Portrait Session from last week-!!