Senior Pictures at Van Hoosen Farm in Rochester, Michigan

There is a wooden footbridge at Van Hoosen Farm that crosses Stoney Creek. Kaia and Taylor had been standing on it a while, doing the thing seniors always do in the first twenty minutes, aware of the camera and aware of each other and not quite settled into either. Then they turned and walked away from me, and one of them reached for the other’s hand. Neither of them looked back. Of every senior session I have photographed in Rochester, Michigan, that is the frame I still think about.

They are cousins. They graduated from Oxford High School in the same class, and when their families booked a duo session they were specific about what they wanted: photographs that looked like the two of them, not two seniors standing near each other. Van Hoosen gives you the room to get there. It is the reason so many of my Rochester senior sessions end up on this property.

What Van Hoosen Farm actually is

Most people know it as the park with the barn. It is more particular than that.

The Rochester Hills Museum at Van Hoosen Farm is sixteen acres inside Stony Creek Village, settled by the Taylor family in 1823 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The farmhouse dates to 1840. The Dairy Barn went up in 1927 under Sarah Van Hoosen Jones, who had earned a PhD in animal genetics in 1921 and ran the farm herself, breeding prize dairy cattle, until she left the property to Michigan State University on her death in 1972.

I do not usually open a session by talking about history. I am telling you this one because it changes what the ground feels like underfoot. This is not a generic field with nice light. It is a farm that a woman ran, with a doctorate, in 1921. Kaia and Taylor did not need to know that for their photographs to work. I knew it. I think it is part of why I keep coming back.

The permit part, which nobody mentions

This is the piece that catches families out, so I want to be plain about it.

Van Hoosen is not an open park where you can simply show up with a photographer. The Museum requires anyone using the buildings or grounds for photography to pay a fee, and photographers are expected to contact the Museum and reserve the site before finalizing a date with a client. Sessions can be turned away when a special event is already on the calendar. Building interiors are closed to photography, even in weather. And no one sits, stands, or climbs on the historic walls, which is worth knowing before you arrive, because that fieldstone wall is one of the strongest backgrounds on the property and there is a right way to use it.

If you are planning something here on your own, the Museum’s photography page carries the current terms and the number to call. If you are booking a session with me, none of that reaches you. I hold the date, I clear it against their calendar, and the permit is already inside your session. You show up.

Sixteen acres, five places worth your time

You do not need all of it. You need these.

The footbridge. The rails give a senior something to do with her hands, which quietly solves the first problem of every session. It runs long and straight enough to hold a walking frame, a leaning frame, and a back-to-back frame without any of them repeating. Late in the day the canopy over it turns everything gold.

The creek. Stoney Creek runs shallow and cold across flat rock. Both girls went barefoot on it without much convincing, which is usually how it goes. Bring a towel and shoes you do not mind setting down in the grass.

The gardens. Black-eyed Susans, coneflowers, tall wildflower beds that come up past the shoulder in late summer. This is the part of the property that photographs least like a park and most like a place someone tends, because it is.

The fieldstone wall. Every color in that stone is different. It is the one background here that does something no studio wall can do, and it is also the one the Museum asks you to respect. We work in front of it, never on it.

The white barn siding. Clean, bright, north-facing for most of the afternoon. If you need one frame that will survive a yearbook crop and a grandmother’s mantel at the same time, it comes from here.

When to be there

The grounds are open year round, but for senior work the window that matters is the last ninety minutes of daylight, late July through early October.

Earlier than that and the open meadow goes flat and hot. Later and you lose the creek, because the tree line takes that side of the property first. I build most Van Hoosen sessions to start in the gardens while the light is still high enough to carry color, move to the wall and the barn as it drops, and finish on the bridge and in the water when everything has gone warm. That order is not an accident. It is the difference between a set of photographs and a set of photographs that looks like one evening.

What to wear at Van Hoosen specifically

The property is green, and in late summer it is aggressively green. That does one useful thing and one inconvenient thing.

Solid, saturated colors hold up against it. So does black, which is why both girls kept coming back to it. Small busy prints tend to disappear into the wildflowers from ten feet away. And I would think twice about green itself here, unless it is a deliberately soft one against the barn rather than the meadow.

Texture is what earns its keep on this property. Linen, eyelet, denim, a felt hat. Van Hoosen is a farm, and clothing with some weight to it reads correctly against a hundred-year-old barn in a way that something slick does not.

On photographing two seniors at once

A duo session is not two sessions stacked together. It is a different problem.

Two seniors will perform for each other before they will relax for you, and no amount of posing gets you underneath that. What gets you underneath it is time, and enough ground to keep moving across so that neither of them ever has to stand still and be looked at. Kaia and Taylor got the bridge, the creek, the gardens, and the wall. Somewhere between the third and fourth of those, they stopped checking.

Every senior still leaves with a full set that is entirely her own. Nobody is a supporting character in her own senior year. But the frames of the two of them together are the ones their mothers cried over, and I have never once seen that go the other way.

Planning a Van Hoosen senior session

Hair and makeup happen with Courtney before we ever leave, the wardrobe collection is available to you, and there are no limits on time or outfit changes once we are on the property. The permit, the reservation, and the timing around the Museum’s own calendar are mine to handle.

If Van Hoosen is not quite the right fit, it is worth looking at what a session in Rochester Hills can look like or at the rest of my senior work across Metro Detroit. There is no shortage of good ground out here. This is just the piece of it I know best.

When you are ready, let’s talk about your senior year.