Paige's Spring Senior Portrait Session

I don’t know the first time I had this vision of Paige in a tule skirt dancing near the ocean – but it’s a vision I’d had a lot since she started high school.  I started thinking about her San Francisco Senior Portraits probably about the time she started kindergarten, but suddenly the time was here.  Suddenly she was a senior in high school.  Even more suddenly she had grown up.  She isn’t that precocious kid with a big smile and loads of words that I always felt was just a little bit smarter than me.  Now, she is almost a grown up.  And she is WAY smarter than me, there’s no denying it now.  That acceptance letter to the engineering program at Cal Poly proved it.  All the same, as her senior year comes to a close and the autumn of her departure to college approaches we headed to San Francisco to give the pictures in my head a place in the real world.  We had run around the mall the night before buying clothes and shoes.  The tule skirt that had been black in my head turned yellow because Paige loved how happy it looked.  And I loved how happy she looked.  We drove into the city and were greated by crazy gusts of wind.  Over twenty miles an hour.  We shot anyway.  We embraced the wind, and all the messy hair it brought with it.  We drove from place to place – all the spots Paige loves, some places she’d never been.  We had her family and her cousin along for the ride.  We even took a moment to capture her little sister, Abby, being SO DAMN COOL it hurt.  But our day was about Paige.  Paige – surrounded by her people, dancing in the wind, laughing with that smile that feels like it could be the answer to almost anything.  When we got to the Sutro Baths the heels we’d bought we abandoned so she wasn’t tossed into the ocean by the great gusts of wind.  She braved the cold and the salty spray.  She held families hands, she made my vision spring to life.  My fairy goddaughter granting me wishes, making dreams come true.  Paigie – thank you for being one of the most wonderful people I know.  For letting me use a camera as a magic wand.  For being the spitting image of my best friend.  For being one of the greatest people I know.  I can’t wait to see what you become.  I can’t wait to see how you change the world.  Because there is no doubt in my mind you absoluetly will.