Grad Season is almost over
Originally uploaded by Emanon Photography
I'm finishing up my second spring graduation season with GradImages. I've been shooting for them non-stop for the past week. My last scheduled graduation is tomorrow. Tomorrow's graduation caps off a string of 20 graduations in the past week or so. Many of them were large graduations too, though even the 900 graduates at the one high School graduation that was expecting close to or more than 1000 graduates doesn't quite compare to the 4 UCF graduations I shot at the beginning of May. Each of those averaged about 1300 graduates if I remember correctly.
In my work for GradImages, our main job is to photograph each graduate in between 1-3 or more poses during the actual commencement ceremony. If you have had official photos taken at a High School or College/University graduation there is a pretty good chance that they may have been shot by GradImages. If you are in FL, you might recognize the name Bob Knight Photo, there have been some corporate mergers, and names have been switched around a few times, but we are the same photographers, and I must say, we are pretty good at what we do. For example, after shooting the UCF graduations, the time from the end of the ceremony to the time graduates received and email with proofs of their photos was between 24-72 hours.
Anyways, one of the other things we do while we are photographing graduations is to photograph and provide the school with complementary Public Relations photographs of their commencement ceremonies. The PR photos as we call them are the one real time the photographers on our teams get a chance to shoot some creative shots. This photo was one of the PR shots that I made for the Apopka High School graduation at the Amway Arena in Orlando, FL. The female graduate was the SGA President and Mace carrier. She was great and let me take some cool shots like this one, and deserves credit for being a photo subject. Some more credit is also due to Kylene Gay (Her Blog Here) who was another one of our team photographers and made a shot similar to this one at another ceremony, which was the creative inspiration for this shot.
To clean up this shot just a bit, I added some selective sharpening and a vignette in Aperture3. Lighting was provided by an overhead high intensity spotlight that was lighting the stage from the rafters of the arena.
