Putting together a large senior photo shoot can be scary. But if you do it in the right way, you can use these photos to launch the senior side of your business.

Jared Rey, of Jared Rey Photography, did just that. He wanted to break into the senior market in his area and he planned a shoot to showcase his abilities with a few senior models. With the help of a fabulous stylist, Vanessa Warren of Butterfly Sparks (she is also our stylist for the Seniorologie Shoot Out in Vegas…see posts with her work here and here), Jared put together a photo shoot that showcases every teens love, Magazines! I love the clothesline of photos from Seventeen. What a cute idea!

Jared shares his ideas for the shoot, the benefits from doing a shoot like this and all the behind the scenes information below! Thanks so much for sharing this with us Jared! To see more of Jared’s work, check out his blog here.

Tell me a little about you…where are you from? how did you get into photography? how long in business? etc.

Where to begin without sharing my whole life story? In short, I am a husband, photographer, and lover of Christ. I am from Texas and currently reside a little over 10 miles outside of where I grew up in a small city named Forney outside of the Dallas Metroplex. I grew up with an aunt who loved photography, so I was always in front of a camera. I have always enjoyed taking pictures but it wasn’t until high school when I took a photography class that I continued to do it more and more. I started my business in 2007 when I captured my first wedding for some college friends of mine. My passion for photography grew immensely at that point and have been shooting proudly for 5 years now.

What was the inspiration for this photo shoot?

Inspiration for this photo shoot came from tons of back to school ads and fashion magazines. I wanted to get a group of girls together to have a school themed shoot but also find a way to let seniors know that I want to also incorporate fashion into my sessions.

Where did this photo shoot take place?

This photo shoot practically took place right behind my house, it was easily walking distance away right behind the local movie theatre in town. It is one of those places you pass by everyday and would never think to have a shoot there, but once I found it I fell in love with the scenery. We also made our way to an abandoned barn that all the local seniors like to visit and ‘tag’ for their senior sessions. I thought it would be fun to do this as well but try and keep it original in a way I had not seen before.

What time of day did this take place?

This shoot took place about 3 hours before sunset.

What camera, lens and equipment were used during this shoot?

I shoot with a Canon 5D Mk2 and find myself struggling to use anything but my 50mm/1.2L lens because I am a big fan. But I did rent the 135mm/2.0L for this shoot and LOVED it for my portrait shots, it is definitely something on my to buy list now! I also used a 580EX II as an off camera flash with a cheetah stand and a transparent umbrella. I also had a silver reflector going on during the individual portraits.

You collaborated with one of my favorite stylists…Vanessa Warren of Butterfly Sparks! How was it working with her?

Well I am one lucky photography because I have Vanessa practically as my neighbor, she lives right down the road from me! So I make sure to give her a shout anytime I need to use her creativity. I enjoy getting to work with Vanessa because she just has a uniquely creative mind and can help me flesh out my random thoughts into something that is interesting and tells a great story. If you can have her on your team you are in for a treat.

What do you feel is the most important thing to consider when working with a stylist on a photo shoot?

When working with a stylist on your photo shoot the best thing to do is just communicate and get out all the ideas you have in your head so they can use all those pieces to get a better idea of what you want for your session. I can’t imagine how many e-mails I sent to Vanessa of random thoughts/ideas and pictures of inspiration that I wanted to incorporate for this session. She did a great job pulling it all together for me.

What did you hope to convey about these girls and about your photography style?

For the school portion of my session I wanted each girl to have a unique personality: your girl next door, the ‘too cool for school’ girl, and the cool nerd. Each girl did a great job with their role and pulled it off. I also wanted to tell a quick story of how fashion inspires my sessions, so I had the girls tear out sheets from fashion magazines and pinned them up to serve as their own inspiration. For their portrait session I just wanted to make sure each of them had fun and I made sure to could capture a little bit of their personality, fashion, and style with the small amount of time I had with them. During our barn session I wanted them to have fun spray painting the barn and capture it.

I wanted seniors who viewed this session to see something different than they do with the other photographers in my area. I wanted to create a session that looked fun, creative, told a story, and was fashion-inspired.

What is your favorite thing about this session?

I enjoyed everything about this session as cheesy as that may sound. I enjoyed getting to set up the shots and working with the girls to get their personalities to come out and just relax and have fun.

What do you think you learned from doing this session?

Although we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do before hand there were other parts that we winged and could have planned out a little better. I learned that having a solid plan and timeline would help keep everything on schedule. Time flew by super fast and I didn’t get to do everything I wanted to do for the session.

How did doing this session help promote your senior business?

I am still working on getting my name out to the Forney/Sunnyvale, TX community and not many people know that my business is around. So I wanted to grab girls from the high school I wanted to market to and created this session in hopes that friends would see it and enjoy the pictures. I also had a friend capture video for the session and I created short teasers along with my main behind the scenes video to build up some anticipation for the session. The shoot and the video served its purpose and I did have a HUGE jump in blog visits and new fans of my facebook business page. Next step is to get seniors booking their last minute 2012 sessions and juniors to begin thinking about their 2013 school year!