Sydney's Senior Session: The Sneak Peek

Sydney is one of those girls that just makes you happy to be around her. The kind of teenager who is kind and compassionate, generous and genuine--all of that, and she's intelligent and conversational, too! She shines from the inside with the truest beauty anyone can have--and she also happens to be beautiful young woman on the outside, too. I've spent a lot of weekends photographing women of all ages beyond adolescence who all have the same insecurities about the way they think they look inside the lens of my camera--all the same insecurities I have myself, and Syd, too, is not immune--but here's the thing. You're beautiful. We all are. I don't know when we lose that inner voice that tells us we can do anything, be anything, the voice that never cared what we looked like in the mirror as we ran past with bare, dirty feet, our hair falling out of a haphazard ponytail to run outside, our arms open wide to any adventure that may have come to us. I don't know when that voice gets replaced by one that whispers darkly to us about our hips being too wide, or our face too narrow, or our clothes being all wrong, or our ankles too fat, but maybe if enough of us remind each other of the voice we knew when we were little, we'll stop listening to that other lying voice, remembering instead how beautiful and capable and strong we all are.

xoxo