3 Favorite session locations:
I’m excited to share my 3 favorite session locations from 2015. This is a tradition that I hope to be able to do every year and hopefully it will provide a resource for my beautiful clients to choose a perfect location for their session.
Location is everything!
Every year I try to find more and more interesting locations to do photo sessions so that I can ultimately recommend places based on clients’ needs and personality. The location should either mean something to the client or bring out their personality and allow them to have fun.
Since I’m from Central Mass, these locations will largely be in that area or somewhere in New England. I will also end the post by listing a few “honorable mentions” and some locations I’m looking forward to shooting at in 2016. If anyone has any suggestions for more locations, please feel free to comment with them below!
3. Stillwater Farm, Sterling, MA
Stillwater Farm in Sterling is one of my new favorite places for a session. It was a small-ish area, but had a lot of different parts to it that made it a great place to mix up poses and backgrounds such as a barn with a red door, farm equipment, a field, dirt road, and more. It’s a place I’ve passed driving a lot and finally decided to check out and I was SO GLAD I did. It was perfect for Chelsea’s senior photos and would be great for engagement photos as well. Looking forward to bringing more people there this year, hopefully! This makes the list of favorite session locations for it’s ability to provide many background and also proximity to other locations in case you desire more than one place.
2. Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary, Natick, MA
For the Wales’s family portrait session, we wanted to find a place in the middle where they could get some candid, lifestyle photos of them and the girls, so we took a shot in the dark and decided to check out the Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary.
It was a really hot and humid day, but it allowed us to go for a walk and entertain the girls while we tried to get some photos out of them. It was so much fun, there were wood bridges to walk across, waterfalls, rocks, trails. The girls loved it and we ended up with a great bunch of photos that showed them candid and natural.
#1 Doyle Conservation Area, Leominster, MA
This is the only area on this list that I’ve been to multiple times. It is one of my very favorite session locations since I began this business. If you live in the Leominster area, and have never been, I would really recommend checking it out. I end up doing at least one session a year there and have been trying lately to push myself to come up with other places, but this location has the most going on by far [for more of the family session pictured above, click here].
There’s a bridge, a pond area, grass, trails, willow trees, pretty benches [for more of the above engagement session, click here]. I could do a million different sessions here and have them all look different. It looks nice in every season and is even pet friendly!
There are still a few other session locations in MA worth mentioning:
Wachusett Reservoir, Clinton, MA
Admittedly, this location requires a little more work out of everyone, but it has so many different spots it’s unbelievable [and so close to where I live]. For the above session, my car battery had actually died and I walked all the way there. Worth it.
Crocker Pond, Westminster, MA
I often took this place for granted because it was down the street from where I grew up and it was silly to me that they turned it into a park, but I’ve done several sessions over there and it has a lot more to offer than I always think [for more from the above family session, click here].
Springfield Quadrangle, Springfield City Hall and places around.
This was a spot one of my wedding couples chose [Wedding: Aug. 1st at Ludlow Country Club] and the buildings provided an awesome and diverse set of backgrounds that gave them SO MANY wonderful options. The Springfield Public Library even allowed us up into their upstairs area to make use of their AMAZING ceilings.
Their library also made for such romantic images [find more here].
I feel like I could just keep going.
I didn’t realize, until now, just how many great, new places I saw this year.
This year, there are also a few places I’m super pumped about going:
- I’m photographing a wedding at the Crompton Collective in Worcester that looks absolutely AMAZING.
- Looking to check out Rauscher Farm, Clinton, MA is right in my backyard [or basically] and I’m looking forward to checking it out and [hopefully] being able to offer it to clients as another great place.
Be sure to keep checking back for more great location ideas and feel free to like us on facebook or leave a comment with your own favorite places!
