Annalisa’s Graduation Senior Portraits in College Station

We are so grateful that we got to do our dear friend, Annalisa’s, graduation photos! She is graduating with a degree in nursing and is a sweet friend of ours from church. We had such a blast taking photos for her and showing her around college station and the A&M campus. Since I am currently still working on my PhD in horticulture at A&M, I am very familiar with the beautiful spots on campus since our department plays a large role keeping these outdoor spaces beautiful!!

The Leach Teaching Gardens with a cute pose of her ripping pages out of a textbook.

I have quite a passion for gardens and cultivating beautiful outdoor spaces so I am grateful we got to utilize them for this special photoshoot. I’m excited to show y’all what we got and describe some of the best spots for senior/graduation/prom/engagement/really anything, photo shoot backgrounds.

Cute bench photo on west side of Leach Teaching Gardens

The first photos we took were at the new aggie park to the east of Kyle Field. My sweet hubby works across the street from this park at the production studio (Texas FilmWorks) and showed us the best place to park is at the association of former students parking lot. It has a gate but it’s almost always open to the public except on aggie ring days. Then there’s this long but funny story about how they have a changing password to get in and it’s always something ridiculous like “ice cream” or something.

Anyways, we then were aiming for photos that didn’t actually show off anything that would stand out as A&M since she is graduating from a different college. However, Aggie Park is amazing if you want to show off Kyle Field or the large aggie ring in front of The Association. There are also great water features and you can get adventurous and go sit on the water fall even!

Then we moved onto my favorite place on campus, The Leach Teaching Gardens at A&M. These gardens are AMAZING. They are right next to my office in the horticulture building and I loved walking to them and just sitting and enjoying some peace and sunlight when I took more classes on campus. It’s still an amazing place to go all year round and they are hoping to expand it soon!

Parking for the gardens is pretty easy. There is visitor parking that you can pay for by the hour in Lot 97. (here is a map to all the parking at A&M: https://transport.tamu.edu/parkingmap/) they have a little pay station that you pay at when you get there if you aren’t familiar with A&M parking.  The gardens have multiple backdrops that work amazingly well at golden hour. There are also bathrooms if you need to do any outfit changes, which we did.

Explore all the little alcoves there are and even walk down towards the river and get more rugged background photos. Since they haven’t expanded the gardens yet, there is still a beautiful open field to the west side of the gardens which is excellent for those stereotypical but beautiful portrait shots.

We also like to get the smiling and more serious posing shots because the serious poses can look very cool in black and white. They give me “album cover” vibes and of course, Annalisa is beautiful, so it was easy to capture beautiful photos of her.

Location: field west of Leach Teaching Gardens

For this photoshoot we used an 80 mm Viltrox lens on our A7SIII, which is just our absolute favorite for photography since it gives us that ultra soft background with great bokeh.
When we edit photos, we love to also bring up the green hues it almost always since it adds in super nice rosy tones and turns the greens less yellow which works very well for the aesthetic we go for.

I hope y’all enjoy me sharing a little bit about our photoshoot at Texas A&M and their amazing gardens. College Station is such a cool town with many other amazing back drops, but for this graduation photo session it was the perfect place to get a variety of backgrounds. Always feel free to reach out for questions or if you are interested in us taking some photos for you!