Senior Portraits
High School Seniors and Sisters

You never know how meeting someone by chance can put your life in a whole other direction.  We would certainly have never guessed that when we met Laurie and her daughter Rachel by planning Rachel’s senior portraits through our senior portrait studio, My friend Teresa Studios that she would inspire us to go in a whole new direction.  But let’s start at the beginning.

Rachel was a rising senior at Cary Academy who had reached out to us about doing her high school senior portraits.  Since Teresa became a professional photographer in 2010 she has focused almost exclusively on high school seniors, families, and small business branding images.  My Friend Teresa Studios built a reputation in the industry for how she creatively captured the essence of each high school senior in a different way.  Rock climbers sat atop sky high beams, backpackers waded across rushing rivers, fashionistas were ready for the cover of vogue, and bright lights and beautiful souls like Rachel were photographed at their best (sometimes even in the rain).  Laurie was along for her daughter’s senior session, lingering as all moms do at the periphery of the session, allowing Teresa to work but happy to help however needed.  Teresa remembers Laurie jumping in with a perfectly matching purple umbrella as the first drops of summer rain started to fall on Rachel’s session.  It was a total fluke but if you’ve met Laurie and her family you come to see that things just seem to come together perfectly when they are around.

Laurie loved Rachel’s senior portraits from My Friend Teresa Studios and both she and Rachel remarked on how comfortable we had made Rachel during her session and how impressed they were with the results.  They selected a beautiful wall grouping for their home that showed off the different sides of Rachel’s personality.  We can’t bear the thought that it would have all ended too soon if Laurie hadn’t mentioned that day that she’d love to have portraits with her horse, Curly.

Teresa was excited and nervous to meet with Laurie a few months later at her barn in Apex.  You see, feeling out a senior and how to make them comfortable, discovering who they are and showing it to the world, that had become a carefully honed skill that had become second nature.  But a horse?  A horse and a rider?  A horse wasn’t a prop like a cello or a basketball that could be moved and positioned and held just right.  A horse was going to have its own feelings and opinions, its own way of standing comfortably, its own ‘best side’.  A horse wasn’t a prop, it was a very large person on four legs.  Everything in our natural rhythm of photography was out the door.  When we pulled in the driveway Teresa’s brain was jumping around like the gravel under her tires.