Here are a few fancy homecoming photos and a few regular homecoming photos. For the fancy ones, I utilized a fancy window and if you look carefully, you can see it is a door. The trick is to make sure the subject blocked out the light which was easy in this case given all the subjects are old enough to be going to a Homecoming dance. I also utilized a stair railing in the foreground to make the whole scene more dynamic. This blocked out the outfits some but that is okay because I also included some more regular Homecoming photos.
For poses, that’s a little trickier, so my suggestion is to look online for Homecoming photos for posing ideas but keep personality in mind too. You really want to try and match the personality and the outfit to the pose. This can be tricky but usually a series of poses will work for each subject, and some may overlap. With practice you will get better at posing, but you have to be actively trying to do so if you want to make progress with poses.
The setup for this session involved 3 strobes. In the case of the window, I used a strobe outside with a yellow gel. In both photo styles are two strobes off to the side with an octagon softbox. For the more standard style of photo, I put a bare strobe up high aimed down as a hair light.