The Secret to Unique Senior Portraits

Search for "unique senior picture ideas" and you'll find plenty of suggestions: stand here, pose like this, bring this prop, go to this location. There's nothing wrong with any of that. But I think it misses the most important part of a good senior portrait.

The most unique thing you can put in a senior portrait is the senior.

Every high school senior has a story. Some make it easy to see - they play football, dance, paint, play guitar, or have some other interest that immediately suggests a direction for the portrait. Others tell me, "I really don't do anything."

That is never true.

Everyone does something when they're not in school. Maybe it's reading. Maybe it's video games. Maybe they spend half their life texting their friends. And if they genuinely spend every waking hour studying, well, that tells me something about them too. There's always a story. Some just take a little more digging to find.

Start With the Things You Love

Before a senior ever shows up at my studio, I ask about hobbies, sports, interests, anything that might lend itself to a portrait. I also tell them to bring ideas, even ones they're not sure will work. Whether an interest sounds exciting enough to photograph isn't their problem to solve. That one's mine.

I once photographed a senior whose big interest was reading. On paper, that's not exactly a thrilling senior picture idea. We could have had her smile at the camera holding a stack of books, but that wouldn't have told us much about who she actually was. Instead, we made a quiet, moody portrait of her curled up with a book, completely absorbed in it. She wasn't looking at the camera. She wasn't performing for it. The portrait was about who she becomes when she disappears into a story.

That's the difference between including something in a photograph and actually using it to tell one.

Unexpected Combinations Are Where the Good Ideas Live

One way to make something familiar more interesting is to combine things you wouldn't normally expect to see together. A football player doesn't have to be photographed in his uniform. What happens if he's in a tuxedo, holding the ball instead?

Suddenly it's a slightly different story. That's honestly one of my favorite parts of this job - hand me an interest, an object, or an idea, and let me figure out what to do with it. If we can make reading visually interesting, I'm fairly confident we can find something to do with just about anything.

Bring More Than We'll Probably Use

When it comes to planning a session, I'm firmly in the "more the merrier" camp. Maybe the senior has two ideas and Mom has three more. Great - bring all five. We won't use every idea, but you never know which one ends up being the spark for something special.

The same goes for sentimental objects. An old letter jacket, a piece of jewelry, something handed down from a grandparent, anything connected to childhood, can tell just as much of a story as a hobby or a sport. Don't spend too much energy deciding whether something's "worthy" of being photographed. Just bring the possibilities. We'll figure out the rest together.

I take the same approach with clothing. At the very least, I like seniors to bring one dressy outfit and one casual one - two ends of the spectrum, with room to fill in between. The more options we have, the more sides of the senior we can actually show, and very few 18-year-olds are just one thing. They might be an athlete and a musician. Serious about school and completely ridiculous with their friends. Comfortable dressed up for prom and just as comfortable in the hoodie they live in three days a week. All of that can exist in the same senior, and it's worth having portraits that prove it.

Right Now vs. Timeless

There's a balance I think matters a lot in senior portraits, and I learned it the hard way, on myself.

When I had my own senior portraits made-many years ago, I was playing in a band. This was the 1980s, so naturally I had photos taken in very 1980s clothing, standing with my synthesizer. At the time, I thought I looked incredible. Looking back now? Let's just say those photos have not aged well.

Here's the thing, though - I don't regret having them. They're completely authentic to who I was in that exact moment. I really was that kid in the band with the synthesizer. What I wish is that someone had also made a more timeless portrait of me alongside it, something with a little longer shelf life.

That's what I try to give the seniors I photograph now. We make some portraits they think are cool right now. We also make something they'll still appreciate at 40, or 50, or 70. Those are two different photographs, and there's room in one session for both.

Mom and the Senior Don't Have to Agree

Sometimes Mom wants the classic, smiling portrait. The senior wants something moody and dramatic.

Perfect. We'll do both.

That's actually one of the real advantages of a senior session - there's time to work through different outfits, expressions, and ideas, so nobody has to decide in advance that every portrait needs to please the same person. The image Mom hangs on the wall might not be the senior's favorite, and the one the senior posts first might not be Mom's pick either. Everybody wins anyway.

Not Everyone Needs to Look Serious

There's a tendency in senior photography to assume a serious expression automatically makes a portrait look more sophisticated. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it just looks like a happy kid trying very hard not to laugh.

I've photographed plenty of natural smilers - ask them to look serious and they're giggling within seconds, because that's genuinely who they are. Other seniors are more reserved, and asking them for a big grin looks just as unnatural in the other direction. Neither one is wrong. My job is to adjust to the actual person in front of the camera, not force them into whatever a senior portrait is "supposed" to look like.

Why I Like Photographing Seniors in the Studio

There are obvious practical advantages to a studio session, especially here in Texas - no 105-degree heat, no rain, no wind blowing hair across someone's face, no watching the forecast all week and hoping for the best.

But the bigger advantage, for me, is variety. Because we're working in the studio, it's easy to move through different outfits, ideas, and expressions in one sitting - formal to casual, serious to playful, timeless to very much right now. High school seniors aren't one-dimensional, and the more sides of them we can bring out, the more complete the whole collection feels.

So What Should You Bring?

Don't go hunting for the perfect senior picture idea on Pinterest. Instead, think about what actually makes up your life right now.

What do you love? What do you spend your time doing? What would your friends immediately associate with you? What do you wear when you feel most like yourself? Is there something sitting in your room with a story behind it? Is there something Mom thinks you should bring that you're currently rolling your eyes about?

Bring it. You don't have to know how it becomes a portrait.

That's my job.

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