From Toddlers & Tiaras to Senior Year: Brooklyn’s Central New York Senior Session

Same Brooklyn. New Era.

There are some clients who come back around and make you realize just how freaking fast time moves, and Brooklyn is definitely one of them. I first photographed her for her 16th birthday, and somehow we're already here doing her senior pictures. Like excuse me??? Who authorized that kind of passage of time?

Now, if Brooklyn looks a little familiar, there's actually a reason for that. Long before she ended up in front of my camera, she appeared on Toddlers & Tiaras. Yes, THAT Toddlers & Tiaras. The giant dresses, the hair, the makeup, the pageants, the absolute chokehold that show had on reality TV for a minute. Obviously that makes for a fun little piece of Brooklyn lore, but getting to photograph her now is so much cooler because she's grown into her own person with her own style and personality, and that's what I wanted these photos to actually show.

For her senior session, we hit two of my favorite places in Central New York: Delphi Falls and Green Lakes State Park. I love doing multiple locations for senior sessions because it gives us a chance to completely switch up the feel without making the gallery look like we tried to cram seventeen different Pinterest boards into one afternoon. Delphi Falls gave us the stone, waterfalls, greenery, and all the slightly moody, fairytale-ish goodness, while Green Lakes gave us the open space, water, and that stupidly pretty scenery that never seems to disappoint.

And listen, Brooklyn has obviously been in front of cameras before, but senior pictures are different. This isn't a pageant. There's no character to play, no giant production happening around you, and no need to make yourself look like whatever version of a "senior" Pinterest has decided is trending this year. My favorite senior sessions happen when we can take all of that pressure off and just make pictures that actually look and feel like the person in them. We can wander around, change outfits, try something weird, laugh when something looks ridiculous, keep going when something looks amazing, and end up with a gallery that doesn't feel like it could belong to literally anyone.

That's probably my favorite part about getting to photograph Brooklyn again, too. I have photos of her at sixteen, and now I get to hand her photos from the very end of this chapter of her life. Someday those two galleries are going to sit next to each other and the difference between them is going to mean so much more than it does right now. That's the sneaky thing about photographs. When we take them, we're worried about whether our hair looks good or which one we're going to post on Instagram. Ten years later, you're looking at the same picture thinking, "Oh my God, I remember exactly who I was then."

So yes, technically Brooklyn's story includes Toddlers & Tiaras, which is objectively a pretty iconic fun fact to have tucked into your back pocket. But this session wasn't about little Brooklyn in a pageant dress. It was about Brooklyn now, standing on the edge of graduation and whatever comes after it. And getting invited back to document another piece of her story was pretty damn cool.

If you're a Central New York senior and the idea of stiff poses, fake smiles, and taking 75 variations of the exact same picture makes you want to crawl out of your skin, hi. You're our kind of person. Your senior pictures can involve waterfalls, downtown streets, your car, your sport, a ridiculous number of outfit changes, your favorite place, or something we haven't even thought of yet. We're not trying to make you look like every other senior we've photographed. We're trying to make sure that years from now, when you look back at these pictures, you recognize yourself.