As crazy as it sounds, my favorite age when raising children was the teenage years, and my favorite photography subjects are high-school seniors. While my associate photographer Jenny’s daughter Marlee is only four (the jury’s still out on the fave age), she, too, gets juiced about taking HS senior portraits.  

Were my children sweet little angels, who washed dishes without asking, never wrecked their car and simply held hands with their b’friends and g’friends? Nope, not by a long stretch. Challenging yes, but it is fun and exciting to watch them come into their being, to see the hard work start to pay off.

High school senior portraits are my favorite assignments because the subjects are young, their skin more supple than it will ever be again, they are idealistic and they are invincible. 

Oh! And the places they’ll (or we’ll go)! When working with students from Plano Senior High Schools, Allen, McKinney and Frisco schools and, some of my favorites, Booker T Washington, we use everything from Whataburger to Deep Ellum to the Dallas Arboretum as the colorful environment surrounding the subjects. And, honestly, we don’t have to go anywhere special to create beautiful. (I’ll tell you about my most memorable shoot in the next couple of paragraphs.)