Anthony - Woodinville High class of '21 !
Anthony! Thank you for choosing my little biz! Your photoshoot was so much fun for me :)
Mostly because of our jolly banter. YOU are a lot of fun :)
Anthony was my first senior portrait client who I did NOT already know to contact me via text... and I was really wary that this mystery person may actually be a Colombian scam-artist preying on naive American small business owners ~ I was just waiting for the misspellings... followed by the circuitous request for dollars or bitcoin! 😆 BUT HE WAS FOR REAL! yay! Anthony, I'm glad you're real! It was a great clue when he texted that he needed to ask his Mom about photography dates :) 👌🏼 Then I was feeling ok :) I was impressed with Anthony's maturity & assertiveness right out of the box.
Last Fall of course, we were well pre-vaccine; "vaccine" was just a goal / a dream with about 20 companies planning or recruiting clinical trial participants; but the vaccine dream was like a horse race with no finish line in sight. We were still in stay-home-stay-safe mode, physically in our own little sanitized boxes. So Anthony & I zoomed a Planning Meeting ~ and finally met IRL at his trim & style at Gene Juarez on Photography Day :)
Thank you, Michael (@mmenhennitt) at Redmond Gene Juarez, for Anthony's trim & style!!! Anthony's Dad, Phillip, met us outside Gene Juarez afterward, and we caravanned to Anthony's home:
Anthony's true home ^ that is- a beach :) Not necessarilllyyy for sunbathing :) Mostly for finding the critters :)
He's a goal-oriented young man, with an inquiring mind, and a passion for the sea... critters!
So Golden Gardens oceanfront park in Ballard was an ideal location to start shooting.
...then we took a little roam... south and over the canal... with new opportunities to pull over & explore new places...
Anthony is a natural born scientist. He gets it from his Mom, Melinda! In 8th grade, his curiosity was inspired by the movie "The Martian" ~ would plants be able to grow on Mars withOUT a weather-vulnerable pressurized greenhouse? Hmmm... He put a variety of food-plants into a vacuum chamber in his basement & added carbon dioxide, to simulate Martian atmospheric composition & pressure - AN 8th GRADER! - and then tested the plants' enzyme functions versus identical control plants at timepoints up to 3 days ~ and THEN crafted the results of his study into a presentation cutely titled
which took him to the top 300 then the top 30 then to a Technology Award at the national science competition Broadcom Masters.
Dude!
^ VERY nice portrait
~ confident, humble, hopeful ~ PERFECT for ANY occasion a headshot could possibly be wanted over your next several years ~ but let's add some "yeah"
awesome ^ !
but i do want a little more... superhero scientist out to save humanity -
that's it! ^
and THIS is why my photoshoot with Anthony was so fun for me :). We were giggling like school kids and having a ball the entire time and making super fun portraits :)
Our next couple portraits in this series may be described by Anthony as "the Discoverer" ~ like the intrepid explorer who plants a flag on the moon, or on a desert island ~ or I may describe the same portraits as "Gatsby-esque":
Yes! see what i mean?? Link:
I'm especially intrigued by one of Anthony's previous science projects... watching video of an aquarium octopus (instead of being there in person) to understand its behaviors / movement patterns / probability that it would be in one part of the tank or another ~ it was suspected that the creature would block the water flow in its tank to get the humans to give it a little excitement :)
Anthony's octopus-observing totally inspires my imagination... on macro-scale quantum mechanics, as applied to an octopus under study. Dear Reader, please allow me to nerd:
And the sun went down...
And we were given a gift :)
o da weetle baby! all washed up awone! ^ Anthony had noticed a sign with a phone number to call in case of baby seals on the beach. He made the call and encouraged the gathering crowd to keep well away from baby :) he was in his element.
On our walk back to the cars, Anthony's dad, Phillip, shared an astounding video clip of orcas interacting with the family's kayaks during a recent family vacation. This was such fun for me to "immerse" myself into this family's life for a day!! Thank you, Anthony, Melinda & Phillip! I hope to touch base now and again to see what science-y things the next years hold for Anthony at
Stony Brook University
:)
Congratulations!!!
