Following up on the previous of Why You Should Be Doing Senior Destinations, I wanted to make a post about the mistakes that we made during our first shoot! These are things that we have since refined as we’re now on our fourth annual destination shoot, but when you’re starting out, you don’t always know what not to do. We always ask what we should be doing, but we don’t always talk about what we could have done better.

Destinations are hard! There are so many moving pieces, you’re in an area that you don’t know and on top of that, you have your clients relying on you to make their experience extraordinary and flawless!

Planning Out Wardrobe Ahead of Time

While we didn’t necessarily not do this, we also made some mistakes around this. For our very first destination shoot, Thomas Nguyen and I thought it would be a really good idea to partner with a boutique. While the theory was good, it also turned into a little bit of a pain. The biggest thing that happened was that our vision and the boutique’s vision didn’t necessarily click.

There were times where the outfits were great, but there were others that even with a mood board, there wasn’t really a connect between the wardrobe and the location. As you know, this is so, über important to making your photos the best they can be. Since we were relying on wardrobe being provided, we didn’t have backups for every single location. We tried to do our best with this, but we could have done better. Definitely have your wardrobe mapped out ahead of time!

Drive Time & Traffic

Our first destination was Los Angeles. Probably the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear LA is TRAFFIC. It came to ours too, but we still encountered issues with traffic. It didn’t go poorly, but something that we accounted for a little bit better for our next destination shoot was making sure we had ample time to travel between one destination and the other. This was big for our second destination as it allowed everyone to be much more calm and really have a relaxing experience rather than running to catch the last bit of light in Venice (true story).

Too Many Girls

During our first destination shoot, we thought “the more the merrier!” Welp, that wasn’t necessarily the case. For our next destination, while I didn’t have too many girls for the first, we scaled it back because Thomas was way overloaded! It didn’t allow us to be as creative as possible and inhibited our ability to work with each senior on such an individual basis as we would have liked. Definitely keeping a realistic expectation for how many seniors you will be able to photograph is key and something that we now put a cap on for our destination.

Whether this is your first destination or your next, I would love to hear about some experiences that you all have had too! Hop on over to Instagram and let’s connect!

And, if you’re looking for a more in-depth explanation behind senior destinations, go ahead and hop over to the SBP Store where Thomas and I have our Senior Destination guide in the shop! Plus, you save 10% with code “BLOG10” at checkout!