Alex’s senior session at Music Hall

I usually try not to embarrass my kids with too many pictures on social media or on my blog, but I’m making a couple of exceptions this year. My son, Alex, is a senior this year, so after he’s spent years helping me with other senior sessions, it was his turn to be in front of the camera.

Alex is a French horn player and has spent two full seasons with the Cincinnati Symphony Youth Orchestra, performing regularly at Cincinnati Music Hall, so the location was special to him. Typically, the musicians dress in formal black and white, but Alex had a blue jacket for his concerto solo performance in the spring with the Mason High School Wind Symphony, so he wore it for this occasion.

We knew the light would be better and it would be less crowded if we started early, so we were on site shortly after sunrise at 6:45 a.m. Although we were the first car to park on Elm in front of Memorial Hall, another car drew up and parked soon after. I was so intent on racing the moving shadows on the Music Hall facade as the sun rose that I didn’t notice what was going on behind me. Twenty minutes later, the street was completely lined with cars and vendor trucks, and the lawn of Washington Park was dotted with neon flags and vinyl canopies popping open for the flea market, scheduled to open in three hours. It was already impossible to get a clean shot of the full Music Hall in the background from the park, so we settled for trying to downplay the most garish trucks by hiding them behind Alex or existing foliage. A thoughtful vendor moved a stack of his boxes from the edge of a raised flower bed to give us a a little more room.

Even though it was early, it was already getting warm for Alex in his jacket, so we decided move on to the next location. Besides, the forecast showed full sun all morning, so we knew that we already had a very limited window of favorable light left.