Midlothian Heritage High School Seniors – Book Your Yearbook + Cap & Gown Portraits Here
Senior portraits should be amazing, award-winning, and most of all, professional. When it comes to making a choice for who will photograph your senior pictures, you have more choices than you have outfits. Just in Midlothian, TX there are over 50 working photographers. In Ellis County, there are hundreds to choose from who you may consider being the right choice for you. The senior portrait photographer you choose is based on so many factors, and I don’t envy your position in making a choice. The fact that you’ve made it here says a lot about you and that you’re looking for something different. You won’t settle for less. So what SHOULD you be considering as you make the choice of who will take your senior pictures?
How Do I Choose a Senior Portrait Photographer?
When you choose a photographer for senior portraits, consider these factors. These are in no particular order, and your priorities are different from those of your neighbors and classmates.
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Senior pictures done outside
– The most common style for senior pictures seems to be those done on location outdoors. Some photographers like the parks and trees, others like the old buildings downtown, and some are still dangerously playing on the railroad tracks. The location and background choice is a decision you should help make, but a true professional photographer will choose locations that compliment your clothing, your personality and tell a story about you. Often times, we choose a location that you would never notice because it offers a complimentary color to your outfit. Sometimes the location is very specific because we want to illustrate something important about you like a sport or hobby. We like the old downtown area look, but if you’re going to be a fine art major in college, you may want something more modern like the Kimball Art Museum. If you played football your entire high school career, we want access to your locker room, or the stadium, allowing us to feature you and the location as a part of the image.
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Indoor senior pictures in a studio
– Most of your friends will have their senior portraits made outdoors. Let’s face it, there aren’t too many portrait studios still open. The thing I love most about our studio is that we can create an infinite number of images for you in the comfort of 72 degree air conditioning. And we can do it on your schedule. I love outdoor portraits as much as the next photographer, but there are certain days where you just can’t work outside. In our studio, we can create the mood, the lighting, the style, and the background. We can do it as many times as you like and in as many different ways as you can imagine. In the studio and outdoors, we use Profoto lighting, which is the highest quality studio lighting you can buy. Profoto lights and modifiers give the most consistent color, perfect skin tone, and beautiful deep shadows. We can control the lighting to the tenth of a stop and adjust it until we find the sweet spot for any given scene.
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Senior Portrait Budget
– No one can ever tell you what to spend on senior pictures. If you ask 100 classmates, you’ll get 100 different results for “What did you spend on your senior pictures?”. Some will say ZERO. Free. My friend did them. One might say $15,000. No, I didn’t make that up. You can actually spend $15,000 on senior portraits. The most common will probably be a range of $150-400 and they will say they have ‘The CD’ or ‘The Digital Files’ or ‘A Print Release’. In all of these cases, they’ve paid the photographer for his/her time and talent and the photographer has given them a license to print and share the images. Our studio, and most professional studio photographers, operate on a fee for their time, and a separate price list for their products. The method allows the photographer to charge a smaller amount for their initial service and expertise and then lets you control the amount of money you spend on products. The average professional portrait studio in the DFW area charges $165 for a session fee and then expects an average senior to spend $1450 for products (Source: Dallas PPA).
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Printed or Digital Senior Portraits
– We are asked daily “Can I buy the digital files?”. The common practice among photographers, especially new photographers, is to “give the digitals” to their clients. The photographer’s costs are minimal and the client has full control over the images. If you like to print your own senior pictures, make a calendar, make a slideshow, or just share on Instagram, you have easy access to the images. Because photographers have found the business to be easy to get and the costs of doing business are low, they’ve also lowered their price for the service. As a full-service studio, we’ve tried hard to compete with the lower prices part of the market and still maintain enough business to stay open. With that said, we operate on a hybrid model of printed and digital delivery. Our primary purpose as a portrait studio is to give you a piece of art that will last for generations. We have carefully selected our print lab partners because they give us archival grade products that look like we expect. Have you ever been to Walgreens and picked up your photos and your face is green? Or purple? Or too dark? The reason your prints look that way is because the printer is calibrated for one setting and no matter what the photo is supposed to look like, the printer has one set of calculations to do and it does them. Sometimes things fall just so, and your prints look nice. Other times, not so good and you ask them to reprint. We actually calibrate our monitors to match our specific lab printers and we always get back what we expect. We work with a specific lab for our small prints , another for our canvas, another for our albums, and another for some of our specialty products. Each of those labs is carefully chosen to give us a product we can be proud to deliver to you. Of course we aren’t blind to the need for digital delivery, so we also have digital file sets available. The pricing varies depending on your total order of prints and other products, but we always include a digital file for sharing with every image we print for you.
How to Book Ivey Photography for Senior Portraits
We consult with each senior and tailor the session to fit their personal style and interests. We encourage seniors to bring as much of “themselves” as they can to their session. If you have a guitar, a cool hat, a nice car, or just a favorite t-shirt, we want to see it. Although we have many tried and true locations and poses, we’re always pushing ourselves to come up with a “new shot” for each client. Call our studio at 972-723-2464 or come by the studio.
Senior Session Fee: $150 with a $500 minimum purchase. Print prices start at $100. Printable digital files are included with every purchased image. We cater to clients who value portraiture as art in their homes. Most of our Senior Portrait clients take home something amazing for the wall, the balance of the images go in one of our Fine Art Albums, and then we supply a variety of gift and graduation announcement options.
Check out Eric from Mansfield Lake Ridge
Check out Sean from Midlothian High School
Ivey Photography is a portrait and wedding photography studio located in Midlothian, TX. Our studio is conveniently located at Main & 6th in Downtown Midlothian. All senior portrait sessions are by appointment only.
