I posted Shayla's senior images on Facebook quit a while back .  Like November 2011 a while back. Sadly, this session and several others have been camping out on a hard drive just waiting to see the light of day here on the blog. The holidays came, and our little girl was experiencing so many milestones that blog publishing took a back seat for a few months.  Even more sad is that Shayla is extended family.  Zoinks, Shaggy, you think that'd give her some kinda priority.  Guess I've been an equal opportunity procrastinator. Anyway, the other day I got her graduation open house announcement in the mail, and that was a little kick in the pants I needed to get these images posted here.  Her and her mom and my aunt came down to Texas from Ohio one weekend, so we wondered around the Deep Ellum Arts District in downtown Dallas before heading out to historic downtown McKinney the next.  Here's a few of the images we came away with.

I've always thought it would be fun to photograph seniors.  After photographing Abby the weekend before Thanksgiving, I'm not sure why I haven't been doing this all along.  I mean, seriously... I had a blast.  I could do this all. day. long. Abby is the homecoming queen from Highland High School in Ohio, and she also happens to be my cousin's daughter (which I believe makes her my 1st cousin once removed if I understood the surprisingly complicated ancestry chart I just looked up on Google).  Abby, her mom (my cousin) Lisa, and Lisa's mom (my aunt) Janet came down from Ohio for a long weekend so we could do Abby's senior photography and just hang out. Abby was so easy to photograph... she's a natural.  I couldn't have asked for a better/easier senior to start with.  We drove around to several places around Dallas & McKinney to get a little variety, and I'm really happy with what we ended up with.  I need to figure out how to get more senior sessions on next year's schedule.  Here's my favorites from that weekend.

I love this next image.  The expression and lighting are killer.

Next up we found an old flour mill in McKinney that made a perfect backdrop for this next series.

This next one is one of my favorites.

The greatest thing about this next image is the story behind it.  I wanted a little wind to blow Abby's hair, but mother nature wasn't providing enough assistance, so I enlisted mother Nicolosi to help out (my mom, Abby's mom and my aunt came along for this session).  I gave her a reflector and what I thought were perfectly explicit instructions on how to hold and wave it to get some wind, but her first 8 takes were fruitless and freakin' funny.  We all laughed at the 2mph wind she was generating.  She eventually got the hang of it, though, and we ended up with this killer wind image.

The making of these next two images was pretty funny, too.  I had my mom holding an off-camera flash with a small softbox on it on one side of Abby, my cousin on the opposite side holding a reflector, and my aunt on flashlight duty shining it on Abby's face so I could get my camera to focus (there wasn't much natural light left at this point).

Eventually the falshlight ran out of juice, and I gave my aunt my iPhone to hold right up to Abby's face to provide enough light to focus.  She nearly poked Abby's eye out with it.

Killer.  We stopped briefly at this next location just to use these two brick walls for an image.  The owner of the building saw us and wondered what we were doing, but he was really cool about lettng us do whatever we wanted.  He did mention that most of the time this space between these buildings was used as an outdoor urinal at night by the guys at the nearby bars.  Nice.

Finally we headed downtown around the Deep Ellum Arts District to get our urban on for a few images.

Thanks, Abby, for the opportunity to capture a few images for you... hope you had half as much fun as I did.