Personal Lifestyle Session | Stanford Cantor Arts Center
The Building Most Bay Area Photographers Walk Past
There's a Richard Serra sculpture at the Cantor Arts Center on the Stanford campus that I've been thinking about for a long time.
Serra's work is large-scale weathered corten steel — shaped into massive curved panels and corridors that you walk through rather than around. The surface texture catches light in a way that flat walls never can. The geometry creates natural framing. And that deep amber rust does something specific when you place a person against it.
The rust and the yellow shouldn't work together. They do.
I arrived forty minutes before we started shooting and walked the full sculpture garden — identified the spots, noted the light direction, figured out the sequencing. By the time we started, I knew exactly where I was going.
The cypress garden came first. A formal allée of tall Italian cypress flanking a wooden bench, with soft directional morning light filtering through the canopy. The bench gives a natural seat. The cypress framing gives depth.
The cypress garden at Cantor — formal, quiet, and almost completely empty by 6pm.
Tight on the face — the cypress bokeh handling everything behind her.
The Serra sculpture is a brief walk from the cypress garden and a completely different world. You step between two curved corten panels and the color temperature changes, the ambient sound changes, everything shifts from soft garden greens to hard industrial amber.
I had three specific positions scouted. The gap between panels, where the opposite surface creates a diagonal line in the background. The tight single-panel shot, where the rust texture fills the frame. And the interior, where both panels curve inward and you shoot through the narrowing space toward the subject.
Angles direct the eye and create the composition.
Light, angles and color come together.
The tight portrait against the corten came later in the session, when the initial self-consciousness had dissolved. The light at the edge of the panel was catching her face at an angle that reveals rather than flattens. Her eyes in this frame are completely unretouched — that's the light, not the edit.
Between setups — I keep the camera up for exactly this reason.
After the structure we moved through the Stanford campus grounds. There's a flowering shrub near the garden boundary — white blooms against deep green foliage — that I'd noted on the scouting walk. The single bloom at frame left, the layered green bokeh behind, and the direct gaze made it a completely different image from everything we'd shot in the sculpture and against the doors.
The white bloom at frame left — a completely different register from the corten and bronze.
The bronze doors at the Cantor Arts Center entrance are one of the most underused backdrops in the Bay Area. Two full panels of cast bronze relief — architectural landmarks from around the world, floor to ceiling. Most people walk through them.
The full-body shot required precise positioning: centered enough that the symmetry of the relief panels reads clearly, but slightly off-center enough to avoid a static composition. The yellow top against the dark bronze is a contrast that takes a moment to understand and then makes complete sense.
Those doors are one of the most extraordinary backdrops in the Bay Area. Most people walk through them.
The laugh that stops a session — and makes the whole sequence worth having.
After the doors we moved through the Stanford campus grounds — a large pine tree with warm bokeh, the Cantor steps, the sandstone columns. Seven distinct backdrops inside two hours, all within a short walk of each other.
That's the thing about this location most people don't realize. It's not one backdrop. It's a dozen.
The steps gave me a clean neutral background — all the work is in her eyes.
About Personal Lifestyle Photography Sessions
A personal lifestyle session is built around natural light, real locations, and photographs that look like you. I work outdoors cross the Bay Area — from Stanford's campus to the Peninsula parks, the coastal trails of Half Moon Bay, and the redwood groves of the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Sessions start at $450 for three hours and 20+ edited images. Get in touch here.