Stylizing Your High-School Senior Portraits

First up is going to be Brandi. She is my hair and makeup artist. She does all our high school seniors. When you’re working with our seniors, what’s the process? How do you get them to the point where they feel comfortable, maybe they say they don’t like to wear a lot of makeup. What’s our process for that?

I let them know that on camera it always looks better if we have a little bit more, our facial features can kind of blur out and things like that in professional photography. So more blush, more structured brow contour, pop of a lip, all of those things will make you look better on camera.

And I think that is so important for you guys to work with a hair and makeup artist. We’ve been working together for years, so she knows what I’m looking for. But I want to tell you this, when we started working together, it was so important that when she was done with hair and makeup, I’d take a test shot and show you, here’s what it’s looking like on camera. Because that’s the only way you’re going to develop a rapport with any hair and makeup artists that you’re working with. To that point, talk to them a little bit about how we build a look versus just coming out of the gate hot.

We always think about what outfits we have that we’re going to be using. We start with something that we can start soft and elevate the look through the different wardrobe changes to create what we need to without having to remove the entire look, and that nothing meshes or becomes muddy or looks weird.

Yeah, we got to build on that look. All right. So for Peyton, obviously this wasn’t her first look. It’s a final look that we built up to, right? It’s a lot. And my thought process always is, if they don’t like it, I’m okay because I’ve gotten four or five other outfits before we got to this. So what did we do with Peyton here?

I wanted to create something with that pop of pink, which the obvious choice was to do a liner on her lower lash line and wing it out a little bit. It looked beautiful the way it was, but Alyssa wanted a little bit more. She said, can we add green? Which threw me for a second, but I’m used to this with you guys. So I shook it off and I was like, what can I do that’s not going to be the typical thing? And I decided to start with the graphic liner, with using a shadow of an olive green mixed in with a little bit of teal to make the green really pop and show that it is green on her eyes. And then I was like, you know what? I’m going to go ahead and just put this shadow on the gloss I already have on her lips and see what that looks like. And I started out as a liner and then I filled it in and I kind of loved what we finished with.

And ultimately, that’s what matters is the kids. Do the kids love it? Mom, dad may not like it. That’s okay. You’re not shooting the entire set with heavy makeup like this. It’s something you’re building to for that kind of ta-da. And for us, with our seniors, we want them to walk away having an experience of a lifetime. My philosophy has always been this is the best set of images you’re going to have prior to your wedding day.

So we want to make sure that we’re giving them this incredible look that they would never have ordinarily. Peyton doesn’t have this outfit. This is something, we’ll have Alyssa talk about this, she doesn’t have this outfit. She would probably never wear her makeup like this normally. Now who knows? Maybe this becomes the normal look.

This also gives them an alter ego type of feel, which is awesome for that final look because they’ve had time to warm up to the camera and do their thing. And then they can be like, okay, this is my alter ego look. I’m feeling myself and really give it to the camera. And a lot of times this is the look that we like the most. The images end up being the best ones of the entire shoot.