Graduation photos

Ceremony day gives you a crowded campus, a schedule you do not control and whatever light happens at whatever hour the university chose. A session one to three weeks earlier gives you an empty quad at sunrise, time to move between the two or three landmarks that actually matter to you, and no risk that the photographs are the reason you are late to your own graduation. It also means the gown is unwrinkled and nobody has been standing in a gymnasium for two hours first.

Campus access is the part worth checking rather than assuming. Public university grounds are generally open, but many campuses require permission for a professional shoot and some private universities restrict commercial photography entirely. The requirement is confirmed for your specific campus before the session is booked, along with any fee, so it is quoted to you rather than discovered on the morning.

The regalia is worth five minutes of planning. A hood is colour-coded to the degree and is put on backwards more often than not; a doctoral tam sits flat rather than tipped; a stole or a cord usually commemorates something the graduate will want named correctly in twenty years. Bring them all, and bring two safety pins. The frames without the gown matter too — a graduate in their own clothes in a place that meant something on that campus ages considerably better than four years of formal portraits.

Sixty minutes covers two locations, solo frames, family groups and friend groups, and thirty retouched photographs arrive within five business days. Say at booking how many people to expect: a group of fifteen is entirely normal at a graduation and it changes which locations work, because the classic gate or archway everybody pictures usually has room for four.