Valentine's Day - C/O 2023 Ambassador Session

Welcome back to the blog and to a long-awaited session that I have been dying to share with you all! This year, I revamped the layout of my year with my senior ambassadors. In years past, the focus has been more on their individual sessions, but I realized that it is better for the team and my schedule if we do more group sessions and events throughout the year. The hardest part for this was finding something for us to do in the winter, between our secret Santa exchange and our grad session. This year, the solution presented itself in the form of a holiday - Valentine's Day.

I had the opportunity to do this session at Virginia Creative Collective, an indoor studio in Staunton that I use often in the winter when it is too cold for outdoor sessions, but I also knew that even though it is spacious, fitting 10 of my ambassadors plus their significant others/friends would be a tight squeeze! With that in mind, I decided to do a rooftop session overlooking Staunton instead.

Undoubtedly, my favorite part about this session was the OUTFITS! It was very cold outside, but my girls did not disappoint with their outfits and powered through the whole time despite the cold. The results speak for themselves, it was worth it! We had the perfect blend of pink, red, white, black and denim, which went perfectly with the color palette and outfit examples I provided. I always try to educate my seniors on outfit selections for their sessions, and each senior I work with is provided with a style guide. When it comes to senior sessions, you want to make sure you are comfortable and showing off your fashion sense, but you also don't want to be afraid to dress up a little bit more than normal. It can make a world of difference!

A lot of my seniors ask if they can bring a friend or significant other to their session to be included in a few photos, and I never have a problem with that! With 12 girls on my team though, I knew that this session would be perfect because they could all get photos with whoever they chose to bring, and it would give us more time at their individual sessions to focus on them! This also definitely challenged my skills as a photographer, because I didn't want everyone to have the exact same spots or poses in all of their photos. We managed to have a lot of variety considering we were on a rooftop with 20 people!

I am so happy that I got to do this creative and fun session with my ambassadors. We ended the session with cake pops, donuts, beautiful photos and new memories made together as a team! Our next group session will be their graduation session, so my emotions will be flowing as I close this chapter with my team, and they move on to greater things in life!