At my very first glimpse of Danine, I knew I liked her.

… even though the first time I saw her it was just on Facebook!

How could I not like her, she was gushing over the senior photos we’d taken of one of her friends.  Anyone who loves what we do that much, is a friend in my book! ;-)

Danine couldn’t get over how much her friend’s pics looked like an Urban Outfitters catalog, which is awesome considering that is a catalog we subscribe to for inspiration and that we love some of the work we see in there!

She contacted us for her own session shortly after publicly raving about us to the world via Facebook, and of course we were more than excited to do a session for her!

Someone who really understands and appreciates our style the way she does… is someone we’re dying to work with! So we set out to plan her own senior session with an Urban Outfitters feel to it!

The more I got to know Danine the more I felt like I (Breanna) not only understood her style, but really clicked with her on a personal level.

Whenever there’s that kind of artistic connection with a client, I feel a lot more free to be myself in my processing of the photos… and I love that!

Of course, this time was no different… I had so much fun working on Danine’s pictures!

The processing wasn’t the only fun part in all of this, actually working with Danine was the best!  Talk about a bubbly, fun, confident girl!

It’s awesome to see someone who has “success” written all over them, getting ready to head off to college!

(She’s going to the University of Arizona if you can’t tell by the U of A shirt she’s wearing in a bunch of the pictures!)

Thanks Danine, for being a joy to work with and for appreciating our work so much!  Good luck with all your future endeavors!

Click to see the rest of the photos from Danine’s Urban Outfitters senior session!

Sarah and her mom Sandy have seen us do enough work for the major events in the lives of their many family members that when the time came for Sarah to get her senior pictures done, they were ready for Radiant!

So they flew into Phoenix from their home in Northern California for a day of photo fun!

And fun it was!  Sarah couldn’t have been a better model!  She was so easy to hang out with that it kept the whole feeling of the session relaxed.

She was even willing to get a little silly with us…

…maybe she didn’t realize we’d actually pick some of those photos to go online for the whole world to see! Ha ha, sorry Sarah!

Sarah has a major passion for photography and it was so much fun for us to get to take pictures of someone who actually knew what we were doing and was interested in WHY we were doing it!

I’m sure she was especially wondering about the “why” when we asked her to do things that would cause even the most trusting people to doubt us!  Like when we asked her to lean up against a dirty wall….

… or told her to make faces like “if you were taking pics with your friends”.

She did a great job following those directions!

Amidst all the techie talk about cameras (which I’m sure was making her mom shudder as she racked up dollar signs in her brain), I managed to get in a few photos of Sarah holding Scottie’s camera.

(This one was taken as a joke about what kind of poses we could come up with to make her look like a “serious, professional photographer”.  Also a photo that she probably didn’t expect to see end up on the blog… oops! Ha ha).

We even did the oh so dreaded “taking a picture of someone taking a picture of you” shot.  I’m usually against things with so much cheesiness, but I actually had an idea to do it in a way that would look cool and I have to say that I do like the resulting photo!

Maybe I just need to get over myself and chance it with the cheese from time to time!  Next time, maybe I’ll even make her say “cheese” when we take the pictures!

We love capturing people doing the things they love so we always encourage all our clients to bring props that showcase their personalities.  Of course the props also help people slip into their own little worlds of things that make them happy, which helps distract them from the awkwardness that many of them feel when having their picture taken!

(Obviously, Sarah has nothing to feel awkward about… she’s beautiful and she poses like a pro!).

Sarah chose 2 props… one was her soccer ball.

This made us of course joke about all the team pics we’ve both taken over the years since I (Breanna) played soccer for most of my life as well.  We thought about having her get on one knee while holding the ball on her hip, just so she could put it side by side with a team photo of her when she was little, but our better judgment prevailed when it came to that particular cheesy picture. ;-)

Instead, we tried to come up with some that were a little bit different.  Including her idea of just completely blocking her face with the ball.

I told you she was fun, who else would think to hide their face during a photo session?!

So after the soccer fun and the photography practice, we finally stopped talking and laughing long enough (Scottie had to say my name like 3 times to snap me out of my long conversation with Sarah while we were shooting… what can I say, I liked hanging out with her!) to get a few photos of her chilling and reading her Bible.

We thought it was awesome that her faith is such a big part of her life that when she thought about the things that represent her… the Bible was one of them.  You don’t see a lot of teens (or actually people of any age) like that!

So thanks to Sarah, her mom, and grandma for being so wonderful that you were a total lift to our day!  We get very bogged down by all the work we do on our computers at home, so it was lovely to have the opportunity to not only get out of the house to do a different kind of work, but to enjoy our time doing it so much that it didn’t even feel like work!  It felt more like hanging out with friends!  Thanks for coming all the way to Phoenix to see us.  We hope that after seeing the resulting pictures, you’ll be very happy you made the trip! :-)

Click to see the rest of Sarah’s Phoenix, AZ senior portraits.

I know I’ve told you all how jealous I am of people with sisters… now let me tell you how jealous I am of people who’ve grown up together like sisters!

That’s the story behind Jess and Katie’s friendship!  They have known each other from birth (or at least as much as you can know someone before the age of 1) because their mom’s are best friends!

(These are their moms in case you were confused for a second there!)

Katie and Jess have been playing Barbie’s, dress up, and dreaming of their future as beautiful teenagers for as long as they can remember.

I’m totally making assumptions on their growing up activities… for all I know they climbed trees and threw dirt clods at each other… although I imagine they did the latter either way, like when they were mad at the other one for stealing the best Barbie.

(Now that my friends, was a run-on sentence (I secretly believe you can put an entire sentence inside another complete sentence as long as they have parenthesis around them… three dots also enable you to add on another sentence; ah the beauty of blogging grammar rules!).)

I do know for a fact (because their moms were spilling their secrets to us whenever the girls went to change outfits) that they have been looking forward to their senior pictures for quite awhile.

So when the time finally arrived, what better way to capture their lives than to do it with them living life together?!  Awesome idea! I can’t even begin to describe the hilarity that was this session.

Over in one corner you have the moms oohing and awing and tearing up, while calling out poses and directions to their daughters. And over in front of the camera, you have the girls rolling their eyes at their moms’ sappiness, while trying to hide the fact that they secretly love hearing the constant comments on how beautiful they look.

Oh man, the dynamics of this session were just fantastic!  The mocking, the “way back when” stories being told, the tongues getting stuck out, and the big giant hugs… it couldn’t have been better!

(I think this photo was a response to a story that one of their moms told about when they were little!)

Again, I stress, this was SUCH a great idea on their part!

Our goal with senior girls is always to enable them to indulge in their America’s Next Top Model Fantasies, while helping them feel like they are actually cooler than that because they’re so mature and down to earth (by the way, I’m not mocking this secret fantasy because I still have it and I’m way past high school!).

All this tension of wanting to be a model, but all the while wanting to act like they don’t give a care… makes it very hard for a girl to relax and be herself!

But having her best friend there who is fighting those same inner battles, makes all the difference in the world!

Having each other and both their moms there definitely helped the girls feel way more in their own element and we got to see their real personalities come out… which in the end is always our ultimate goal!

We did our best to get photos of the girls together…

…and separately.

(A guy walked by selling roses and we were so caught up in the moment that we bought some!)

Of course we had to make sure to get some with their moms and them together!

To add to their mom’s oohs and awws were my own (Breanna) because I kept being blown away by how crazy amazing these girls were at posing.

They were just popping from one perfect pose to the next all on their own.

We’d tell them to do a serious face and they’d hop right into it and straight into the smile after the first camera click, just ready for the next photo.  Amazing!

Both of them were absolutely fantastic models and I kept gushing over how easy they were to shoot.

I mean, girls this beautiful are a breeze anyways, but when they are super comfortable with posing in front of the camera, you just can’t go wrong!

Along the way in this session, we ran into one of their friends who was getting his senior portraits done.  They ran over to say hi to their friend and we ran over to say hi to his photographer… who happened to be the photographer we hired to shoot our wedding!  If you haven’t seen Jefferson Todd’s photography… check him out!  He’s a great guy who is one of our good friends and an equally amazing photographer!  So anyways because we knew him (and his girlfriend Ashley, who was actually leading the shoot) we were bold enough to ask to borrow their model so we could get a shot of him with the girls.  That was a lot of explaining for just one picture… so here’s the photo that all this hubbub was about! ;-)

That’s the story behind this fantastic senior session (even though there’s really so many more stories within this story… just like there’s so many more sentences inside of this one sentence!).  I’m sorry, but I have to say that I’m really proud of myself for tying in that grammar lesson so well as if I planned it that way all along… admit it, you’re impressed! Ha ha! But to bring me back down from pride cloud, I’ll admit that I don’t know how to spell “sentence” as I’ve learned after seeing how many times spell check flagged me.  My wittiness is thwarted by bad grammar once again… bummer!  Alright before I continue on that uncomfortably long tangent, what I meant to say was, it was so cool to be around people who have such history together.

(Take a moment to pause and say “Awwww” in unison because they are so sweet together in this picture.  Sorry Tracy and Sandy, but our entire goal with these photos is to make you guys cry!)

It seems like Phoenix Metro is a pretty transient city and it’s so spread out that it can be hard to have long lasting relationships of value.  Scottie and I find ourselves constantly hoping that we’ll one day end up in a strong community that sticks together for many years, helps strengthen our marriage, gives us loads of encouragement, and helps us laugh our way through both good and bad situations in life.

We pray constantly that throughout our lives, we can make friendships like the ones we saw here that will last through us raising our children one day (by the way, these children I speak of do not exist yet).  It’s such a beautiful thing and we feel lucky that we were able to witness it with you guys.

You helped remind us that it IS possible and it IS worth the work that long term relationships require.  So thank you from the bottom of our hearts to Tracy, Sandy, Jess, and Katie for being such amazing examples of time tested friendships.  We hope you all know how blessed you are to have one another (this is another place for the united “awww”).

Click to see the rest of the hilarious, cute, and moving photos from Jess & Katie’s BFF senior session!

Ever heard of the “wind-blown look”?  Well Christy knows what that means now!

While we were rejoicing that we were still quite a bit shy of  100 degree weather when we went out to do her senior photo session, we definitely felt like we’d been transported to the windy city for the day!

Luckily Christy has the type of hair that looks fantastic blowing in the wind and she was chill enough to make the decision to stop fighting the fly away hairs and just go with it.

(I love this one… you look so beautiful, Christy!)

Once she got into her posing groove, there was no stopping her… not even a few stray hairs could hold her back!

We noticed right from the beginning of the session that there was a major quality that stood out about Christy (besides the fact that she was genuinely nice to us and didn’t treat us like the old fogeys that we are)…  she was CONFIDENT!

Such a rare quality to find in a teenage girl… and Christy has it!

She held herself with grace and poise the whole time and even though there may have been moments where she doubted herself (or us, as was probably the case with this experimental pose below that Scottie was trying out)…

…she played it off and did a great job owning herself and the moment and being comfortable with herself (and with us).

The comfort thing was helped by the fact that we spent quite a bit of time with Christy at her sister’s wedding when we were the photographers and she was the bridesmaid.  It helps people relax with us when we’re not total strangers.

It probably also helped her to relax that her mom was there and her mom happens to be one of those people who makes everyone feel comfortable when you start talking to her.

So there we were… a comfortable group, standing in the wind, looking for just the right lighting, while holding our cameras waiting for just the right moment. And voila!  That moment came and Christy was ready and waiting for it!

(You know I’m right when you see pics like this, huh!  She did a great job and was a fantastic model!)

I’m serious when I say that both Christy and her mom, Lisa, put us at ease (and hopefully we did the same for them) and allowed us to relax and immensely while enjoying the time we spent doing our “job” that didn’t feel like a job at all!

So Christy and Lisa, I can’t stress enough how awesome you guys are to work with (I already gushed over them once in the blog about Christy’s sister’s wedding).  You are wonderful people and we feel privileged every time we get a chance to be recipients of your kindness.  Thanks for choosing Radiant again!  And Christy… good luck with college, we hope you love it! :-)

Click to see the rest of Christy’s Phoenix, AZ senior portraits!

It only took a couple of emails from Rachel to figure out that she LOVES color!

Unfortunately for her, it’s winter time and the dead vegetation (if you can ever call it “vegetation” in Phoenix) doesn’t really provide a lot of vibrant color right now.

She was OK with that though and she just decided to make up for it by wearing lots of bright colors.  She rotated around between her flowing green skirt….

…her bright yellow shirt….

….and her pretty purple shirt.

Aside from her colorful attire, the other thing that really stood out about Rachel that comes across very strong in her pictures is her confidence!

From the moment we met her, we could tell that Rachel was very comfortable in her own skin.

She definitely had a unique, sparky little personality and she was confident enough that she wasn’t afraid to show it!

That bodes very well for photographers whose goal it is to communicate who you really are through pictures!

Cameras tend to freeze people up and change their personality, so we definitely rejoice when we meet someone who seems the same on camera as off!

You wouldn’t think that would show up in a frozen frame, but it really does!

Unfortunately for many people, confidence isn’t the only thing that guides the feel of your pictures, insecurity rears its ugly head pretty well too!  So the moral of this story is that if you are not a confident person naturally, try to at least fake it on picture day!

Here are some of our other favorites from the day (click to see ALL the photos from Rachel’s Arizona senior photo session).

Thanks Rachel for being comfortable enough to be yourself around us and for not being afraid to express your opinion (mainly about the high importance of color)!  We had a great time with you and we hope you love your pictures!!  Click to see the rest of Rachel’s Tempe, AZ senior photography session!

I’m trying to decide between going with the cheesy “endings bring about beginnings” type of blog for this, or a “book your 2010 senior session now” shameless self-promoting kind of blog, or simply a “look at these photos” blog.  Since I can’t decide and I tend to have strong nostalgia for things that remind me of childhood… I’m going with a “Choose your own adventure” blog!!!  Aren’t you so excited?!  There you are…. thinking you’re just taking a normal/boring break from work (that’s right, I know our blog gets the most hits during work hours!) to read a normal/boring blog while sipping your normal/boring coffee…. and you find out your on the brink of a great adventure!

So here’s how it works….

To read about Jake and his big move up the coast, skip to where it says “PAGE 1“.

To read about why you need to book your 2010 senior session now, skip to where it says “PAGE 2“.

To read about… well, nothing because you just want to see the photos, skip to where it says “PAGE 3” (easy to find because it’s also just a bunch of photos. Ha).

If you have a REALLY big cup of coffee to finish and you are settled in for a good, full story, you can read straight through!  If that’s not adventuresome enough for you, you can always be a bit edgier and read the pages out of order, you dare devil you! ;-)

PAGE 1

When Jake’s mom (Pamela) originally called me to schedule his senior session, it was during a time when we were completely booked and had no openings available for photo session.  She was pretty bummed because she had just found out they were moving for a job in a couple of months and she really wanted him to have Radiant photos to remember his last year in AZ by!

(Not everywhere has wide open skies like Arizona does!)

Luckily, they were going to be around just long enough for us to schedule a session far enough out that we’d have time to shoot it.  The timing has worked out perfectly because Jake has finally decided to cave and get a Facebook page so he can keep in touch with his AZ friends once he moves up the coast.  Now he has some photos to use as his profile pic!  To help you get started on Facebook, Jake, here are our picks for the best profile photos! (Fan us on Facebook to see all our new photos and blog posts!)

When we asked Pamela if there were any props she’d want to bring to help us capture who Jake really is, she mentioned drums.  Uh… that’s a new one for us!  Luckily she had a plan… they were just going to bring the snare drum!  Phew!  I really didn’t feel like dragging around an entire drum set from place to place! ;-)

Jake’s been playing drums for pretty much as long as he can remember (his dad plays too… they have a loud house!) and his mom says that when you think of Jake, you think “drums”.

We thought it was so awesome that even though his mom was the one who really wanted him to get photos…. she did everything she could to make sure the photos really fit him and to make sure these pics would be ones he liked as well.  He wore his favorite jeans and t-shirt…

….and brought along what we call “the mom/grandma outfit”… that is the nicer shirt that seniors usually bring along to wear while we get some standard shots of them smiling. These are the pics designed to make their mom/grandma happy enough to pinch their cheeks when they see the final product. :-)

Of course the jeans and t-shirt outfit is to be worn for the pictures they’ll like that make them look cool, tough, or whatever look their particular style calls for.

We were happy that Jake and Pamela seemed to get this and work it out very well!

(Here’s mom and son collaborating… t-shirt plus smile).

PAGE 2

Those of you who skipped ahead, may not have read about how Jake almost didn’t get to schedule his senior session before he moved because we were completely booked!  And if you skipped here, I’m assuming you’re considering the possibility of having Radiant Photography do your senior pictures.

If so, you need to book soon because we do and will fill up our schedule!  And while Billy Madison is a cool movie, you don’t want to actually have to wait until you’re 27 to get your senior pics done.  Click here to see more senior sessions we’ve done and to get more info about our pricing and all that.  Make sure you check out our photo “tips” page too because there might be some helpful stuff in there for all the important photo opps you’re going to have during your senior year.

Fan us on Facebook to stay up to date with our schedule and our most recent photo sessions.  Email us to schedule YOUR senior session! P.S. We can do you and your best friend’s senior sessions together!  So you can get photos of the 2 of you and of you by yourselves!!!

PAGE 3

Pictures, pictures, pictures. Here are some of our other favorites from the session.  P.S. If you skipped to this section, you missed all the photos I posted earlier in the blog!  Ha ha, that’s how I trick you into reading the rest!

Jake,  congratulations on graduating!  You are an awesome guy and you put us at ease within minutes of meeting you.  We appreciate how friendly you were to us and how much you humored us (and your mom) as I’m sure standing and smiling in front of a camera wasn’t your favorite way to spend an afternoon. ;-)  You did a great job and we truly did enjoy your session.  Thanks to you and your mom for being so fun to work with and making our job so easy!

Click to see/purchase the rest of Jake’s senior portrait photos!

Attention class of 2010:

Radiant Photography is looking for senior models in the Phoenix area to be a part of our class of 2010 “Uniquely You” marketing campaign. This is a great opportunity to get your own unique senior pictures for free!

As a Radiant Senior Model you’ll get: a free photo session, free pictures for your facebook page, & free model cards to hand out to your friends.
You will also have your pictures featured on everything in our “Uniquely You” campaign including: Radiant’s facebook page, website, and marketing materials.

In addition to all of that, you’ll have the chance to earn free stuff by telling your friends about Radiant!

So if you or someone you know might be interested, check out our website for more information and to fill out an application:

Phoenix Senior photography model application

We’re accepting a limited number of models so get your application in soon!