A Texas Senior Session

Today's featured senior session comes to you from Michelle Ivy Photography located in Driftwood, TX. Here is what Michelle had to say about her session!

Please describe the session:
"This session was a model session. The theme was Shipwrecked."

Tell us about the gear used:
Nikon 810
Sigma Art 50mm 1.4

What inspired this session?
"We have a house on Galveston Island. I love to shoot there as much as possible, especially model shoots. In Galveston Bay there are all kinds of little islands...sand bars really and I thought how fun would it be to bring a few girls out here for a shoot. What better theme than Shipwrecked!"

Hair and Makeup Artist:
One dose of Beauty

What educational topic would you like to write about?
"Here is a little preview of our 2019 Model Shoot Shipwrecked!!! I decided to do something a little different rather than just select a theme, we developed a whole story. We treated it like a movie and tried to answer who, what, where and how. We even had to shoot the sequence of the story out of order for the purpose of our hair and make up flow. The story begins with Fashion Bloggers on a tropical retreat shooting content. Therefore I needed the outfits to be super trendy. So I picked a Rainbow dress, fly away pants, plunging neckline dress... I needed the colors to be bold and bright. We pinned pictures for our mood board of girls pool side and in and near tropical plants. For the actual shipwreck, I decided the shoot would change into more of a trash the dress senario, but stay with the story line. So the girls laid in the waves, crawled out of the ocean and then had some fun with smoke bombs which were simulating flares. For hair and makeup, we teased the hair and smoked out all of the makeup to make it look like it was running and smeared but in a pretty way! The final scene in our shoot was the island life. Pretty sure that this was the girls favorite. We shot this look second and they did not want to get out this outfit and look. Mirabell, my MUA, out did herself. I wanted lots of highlighter and golden glitter. I mean they are living on a island. For hair I wanted sea shells and braids. The clothes, we tried to make most of it look like it was just something that they found like fishing net or a scarf, etc.. My motto is more is more and we definitely keep this in mind while we were accessorizing. The girls and a few moms spent the night with me at my beach house the night before the shoot. The girls actually made some of the jewlery and the pineapple drinks and hair accessories for the shoot making it more personal for them. Also, my biggest prop to date, is I built a real raft. Orginally the plan was for a 6x8 bamboo raft with a sail. However only half of our bamboo showed up. The second half was actually delivered the night of our shoot. So I ended up having to rework the orginal plan. My next challenge was wind! At the beach, even on a good day, wind is 15-20 mph with gust much higher. I could not get the sail to stay up so I called my son who is studying Civil Engineering at the University of Texas and he came and helped me out and viola...a sturdy sail. We also decided to shoot the raft scene in a cove hoping to lessen the wind. Only problem our location is actually a cow pasture. You've heard of salt grass right? So yeah, giant piles of cow poo everywhere. It would make for an awesome "what you see/ what I see" on an instagram story. Lastly, I just want to mention how perfect my models were for this story from start to finish. The moms too...so helpful. It truly takes a village to pull off a model shoot of this magnitude!!!"