As a photographer I often find myself looking at Google Maps to find new areas that are interesting to me that would serve as a new location for a portrait session that I’ve never worked at before. I have my favorite locations in Portland for senior portraits but I love when folks are open to try a place they’ve never been and trust my intuition and experience that it will work as a great setting. This senior photo session was one of those moments.
While Sauvie Island is not particularly new to me, I’ve had an area of the island on my radar for a while that I knew held a lot of potential. When this senior reached out I asked, as I always do, if she had any particular locations or settings in mind for her session. She was excited to shoot in a place that had flowers and was open to ideas. A lot of areas around Portland with dense amounts of flowers are usually farms and depending on the season may or may not be in bloom. They can also be a little tricky with photography permits. Thankfully in early September the sunflower maze at Topaz Farm on Sauvie Island was still in bloom and they have an easy system for photographers to use the maze for a session.
Since this senior had booked my package with 2 locations I wanted to make sure that our second location was relatively nearby to save time but different enough that it could give us some variety from our time at the sunflower field. Since our first location was already on Sauvie Island, I knew exactly the spot I wanted to try out.
We started our session off in the early evening at Topaz Farm and we navigated, sometimes awkwardly lol, through the sunflower maze. Since we weren’t really focused on finishing the maze and instead finding areas with vibrant blooms and nice light we got a bit turned around but we managed to get some great photos and make our way back to our cars. We met back up at a trail head, did a quick outfit change, and walked throughout some really nice woodland areas and meadows. The golden evening light came in perfectly and I was really happy to finally shoot in an area I’d been thinking about for a while.
This was one of my favorite senior sessions to date. I loved getting the chance to fit in a location that my client wanted and share with them a new location that they ended up loving. We got a lot of variety of images and we had a great time shooting together.
