Brianna O'Daniel

Laura Mantooth
Jul 3, 2020
2 min read

Updated: Jul 5, 2020

2020 College Graduate

Brianna and I met each other at Lee University and stayed in touch after she transferred to Bowie State University. She just recently graduated with a degree in history education and is going to be teaching middle school history in the fall. I was so excited when she reached out to be to take her photos, however, we had a very small window to work with since she lives in Maryland, and I was heading back to TN soon. Thus, this crazy adventure came about.

Like I mentioned before, we had a limited time window where we could take these photos before I was headed back to TN (10 hours away from her). Too add to the craziness, it was also raining a little bit every day, and I got up that morning with a migraine that I just couldn't seem to get rid of. We ended up meeting at Jefferson Patterson Park for the photoshoot, and right before we arrived it has just finished a massive thunderstorm. The skies were starting to clear and looked promising, so we moved forward with the photoshoot. We got down to the boardwalk at the waterfront, and less than five minutes into taking photos- it started raining. Thankfully it was a light rain, but it felt like we had just lost our chance for photos. I will admit that I got downtrodden, but Brianna was keeping positive, and wanted to go ahead and keep taking photos in the rain. So she jumped out in the rain, and I switched between holding an umbrella between my shoulder and neck and putting a towel over my head to keep the camera dry. We started to laugh and have a little fun as we moved to the small beach, and suddenly it stopped raining!

We rushed to take advantage of this break in the weather and took several fun photos on the beach. I even took off my shoes and waded into the water to get the perfect shot. Plus the water just felt nice on my feet and helped with the migraine I was fighting with. We used several different props throughout the photoshoot, such as a picture of young Brianna, an apple (for teaching), graduation gown, tassel, and cap, globe, and some 2020 balloons that gave us some trouble. The balloons in particular added to the already crazy photoshoot because they quickly begun to deflate with the high humidity. Thankfully as the day went on and we moved to the second location, the balloons came back to life and we got to have some fun with them. Just check out how wonderful these photos turned out!