Charleston Help-Portrait 2011

Helped out with another successful Help-Portrait event this year. And for the third year in a row, it was a chilly and rainy day. It was a great event though despite the chill. Seeing the expressions on the faces of everybody when they see their photo is heartwarming and exceedingly gratifying.

This year the tent was slightly smaller and the lights a lot bigger, but at least the roof of the tent was all white. No need to deal with odd lighting like we did last year with the yellow and white striped tent.

Like last year, we didn’t do any printing on site and considering the smaller space we had this year, probably just as well. I didn’t get an exact count, but from a brief look at the log sheets it looked like we had at least 160 families go through. Most of them were pretty large groups too. Most of the families that came through my station had 4-7 people. I’d say we took photos of at least 500 people today. With that much volume, trying to print photos on-site is pretty challenging. Since we were shooting tethered we were still able to give everybody a look at their photo.

We had three photo stations set up with some pretty big soft boxes at two of the stations. Made things cozy, but the photos were well lit.

Portrait station lights.

Overall, things went pretty smoothly today. One of the photographers was having problems shooting tethered and eventually abandoned it. Not sure what the problem was, although it might have been cable related. Although the tethered shooting with my camera wasn’t working during testing, it worked just fine with Mike’s Nikon D40. I was worried for a little bit that it wasn’t going to work, but it turned out fine. As always, test everything before hand, and then test it again.

Having a bigger space would have been nice, but otherwise everything went pretty well. I was happy to work with a great group of people for yet another Help-Portrait event, and look forward to doing more in the future.

Johns Island group for Charleston Help-Portrait