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 :)
Where to start... where to start... at the beginning!
Anthony was my first under-18-er ( NOT already in my mobile's address book ) to contact me via text about making his senior portraits,
... and I was really wary that this supposed-high-school-senior-yeah-right would actually be a Colombian scam-artist who preys 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 :)
~
Yep, in my entire experience (8 years?) until Anthony, in cases where I don't already KNOW my high schoolers, it has always been a parent who contacts me about senior portraits ~ So I was impressed with Anthony's maturity & ask-for-what-you-want-assertiveness right out of the box.
(A, did your parents TELL you to contact me? If so, DON'T tell me; don't ruin it, just let me continue being impressed!)
~
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 I first "met" Anthony via text, then email, then finally Zooooming a Planning Meeting ~
But meeting for his trim & style at Gene Juarez on Photography Day was the first time we met in person :)
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...
... and so we came to Discovery Park :)
"Discovery" Park... how appropriate...
Anthony is a natural born scientist. He gets it from his Mom, Melinda! Nature? Nurture? Gotta be both :)
His curiosity flows into original ideas which flow quite naturally into action. I don't know whether his family knows that for most people, an idea is just an idea- people don't generally DO something about their ideas. But here's one of those who may not separate the idea from the doing, if it's a good idea, he does it. That's the impression I had anyway! Where is the fear, Anthony? Where is the possibility of failure tucked away in your mind? Nada.
So, he likes to run experiments.
At the time of our shoot, I believe Anthony was testing standing water in local neighborhoods for the presence of micro-plastic pollution, and then tracking concentrations of the micro-plastics in closed systems (baggies) over time in hopes of discovering plastic-chomping microbes,.. (??) This could totally turn into a mad scientist movie where he develops these microbes and they get unleashed on the world muah-ha-ha and eat up all our plastic life conveniences plunging us back into a time of biodegradable drudgery like the last 70 years never happened! oh the horror!
He's been entering science competitions for half his life (or more)!
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... who knew? so - he took action to discover answers - why not? 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" because this is senior portrait time ...
awesome ^ !
but i do want a little more...
how shall we say...
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 ~
while I may describe the same portraits as "the Gatsby":
Yes! see what i mean??
Link:
I'm especially intrigued by one of Anthony's previous science-y projects... It wasn't the most exciting for him, if I remember correctly, because the study involved hours upon hours of 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 ~ was this the creature that would get bored and block up the water flow of the tank to get some tank-cleaning-time 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!!!
