Lily’s Senior Session, Excelsior Minnesota

I literally am at a loss for words about how perfect this session was. Lily was my last senior of the 2021 senior season and WOW what a way to end the season! We headed out to Excelsior, Minnesota AKA one of my favorite shooting locations, and the place where I took my senior pictures back in 2018! Crazy how much time has gone by and how things have come full circle. Back then I thought I wanted to be a landscape photographer, until 2019 when I discovered I love portrait work! A little fun fact about Lily, her older sister and I were best friends growing up and probably terrorized her (alongside my sister Paige) in all of our games. From pretending to be teachers and having a classroom set up in my parent’s basement and ACTUALLY making Lily do school work from our old math workbooks to making her run down the street holding a sign for our lemonade stand, she really endured it all! She even endured some modeling things from Alexa and me because back in the day we had a photography Instagram together! It is literally so crazy watching all these kids grow up and seeing myself and my friends growing up. I think I have mentioned growing up and how crazy it is in every single blog post that I have written this summer, you all are probably tired of reading about it but my mind is literally blown away by how much time has gone. This whole session I even kept telling Lily how old she was and how weird it was taking her senior pictures.

Her session has its share of stresses, we had a bad forecast originally and we were thinking about rescheduling but the yearbook deadline was approaching quick and she was leaving for a vacation (jealous to be completely honest) so we really needed the timeframe of our session to work out, and thank god it did! After a last-minute location change to have more of a clear forecast and a little bit (or a lot) of wind everything worked out perfectly! Lily is such a natural in front of the camera and it definitely shows in her images, I hardly had to do anything during this session- my job was literally effortless with her. I am really excited about some of the new spots that we found during this session as well, I am often in Excelsior so it’s always refreshing finding new walls and backdrops for sessions to mix it up a bit. I think my favorite new find was the wooden staircase! The warmth and the tones are literally like a chef’s kiss of goodness that makes my photographer's heart so happy!