This time of year, I am typically photographing a lot of weddings. Lately I have been doing bridals and engagements like crazy! I am typically pretty busy with wedding videos and editing photos to get much into graduation pictures, but this year I have one person close to me who is graduating, and it was time to finally get his graduation photo shoot done.
When my dad was younger, he did a fair amount of modeling, he made sure everyone knew that he wasn’t always the brash big guy that everyone knew him to be. Sadly when he died 2 years ago, the legacy of modeling was dead, or so we thought! My brother Adam pictured below is the one graduating this year, and I couldn’t be more proud to have him living in my home. My home life wasn’t the best growing up, we never really had much. Most of our clothes came from the neighbors it seemed, we never had enough of what we needed, let alone anything up and above that.
My dad remarried late and had 5 more kids with my wonderful step-mother. The life of “never enough” didn’t change.
As I got older, into my late teens, I took it upon myself to give to my younger siblings, things that my dad couldn’t. I would take Christmas to them in Ephraim so the kids wouldn’t go without, I would kidnap the kids one or 2 at a time and bring them up to the Big City of Salt Lake to spend a weekend with me, experiencing all that life had to offer. As I got married and started having a family, we spent more and more time visiting with my younger siblings and bringing them up to visit us. Little did we know, we were preparing ourselves, and them for what was to come, when dad died in 2016.
Adam, now 18 is getting ready to move on with his life and go out into this world as a man. He has been dragged through some pretty ugly stuff, and he’s come out ahead, a better person because of it. He is an inspiration to me and many who come in contact with him. As I edited the pictures from his shoot, it took me by surprise how much he looks like my dad, in all those modeling pictures he used to make sure we all knew about. Here is my amazing brother, getting ready to take on the world. Hopefully the next time you see him he’ll have his graduation gown on – we’ve been looking at sites like Jostens to get them for him – from college!
It was so much fun picking the most random locations to shoot at downtown Salt Lake City, we drove all over. At one point we ran into some police, who thought we were doing a drug deal in a dark alley.
I wanted something more interesting, urban feeling, almost like the streets of New York City. I think we pulled it off, what do you think?!
