Suwannee High School Senior Portraits

Gainesville, Florida

Alyssa Hahn

When Alyssa asked if we could do her senior portraits in downtown Gainesville, FL, I said “Um, of course!” I’m a huge fan of going different places that present new creative challenges for me. We started our day with hair and makeup by Manning Vaughn in Live Oak, FL. Alyssa is a very “go with the flow” girl. She is not picky and very easy to please so gave Manning pretty much free reign to do whatever she wanted. Once we were finished primping, we headed down to Gainesville to start taking photos.

When we arrived in Gainesville we immediately got Starbucks because how else do you prepare for a 2 hour photo session? Alyssa wanted to do her portraits by the Hippodrome which I thought was super cool because I’ve never photographed there before. We battled quite a bit of people (I guess they do class, or maybe practice inside the Hippodrome?! I have no idea!), but had a lot of fun! After the Hippodrome we traveled over to Lake Alice for some nature portraits. We both grew up at Lake Alice since that’s where our parents park for Gator football games. Between football games and attending the University of Florida, I know the area pretty well and was able to take us straight to the lake and a cute garden that UF maintains. While at the lake we saw a HUGE turtle and tried to calm ourselves that there wasn’t a gator just as big behind it! Needless to say we put mom on “gator duty” to make sure we weren’t going to get eaten while finishing up Alyssa’s photo session. Finally, we ended our time together at this super cute garden that had little, tiny ants crawling ALL OVER the sidewalk. When I say they were everywhere, I mean there were THOUSANDS of them! We did some dancing to keep our feet off of the pavement, lost mom in the bamboo, and rushed out of there before the storm hit.

All in all it was a fun day walking around Gainesville and I enjoyed getting to know Alyssa a little more!

-Shelly

Location: Gainesville, Florida | Hair and makeup: Manning Vaughn