Images for a Cure Shoot #1: The Warner Family
28 October 2009
In support of Images for a Cure this year, I scheduled 2 family portrait sessions. I'm a very enthusiastic amateur photographer, so I've not done many portrait sessions previously. So as not to scare people away, I sold my sessions as 30-60 minutes, but with equally enthusiastic clients, we found we could shoot much longer!
Sunrise with the Warner Family
Beth works in my office, and she's a breast cancer survivor...well, surviving -- our photo shoot was 6 days after her surgery! She's ready for a bit of radiation next. When I first emailed around the office about Images for a Cure, she contacted me right away about doing the shoot -- I had intended to ask her to do a shoot if she hadn't beaten me to it.
Beth came to the project with all sorts of ideas of dressing her family up in all pink and all that, so I also ran out and picked up the lightest, pinkest cloth I could find to let flow through the photos as well.
When the morning of the shoot came, we all met in at the John Wright Store in Wrightsville and headed over to the south side of the Veterans' Memorial Bridge to start out. Being on the south side of the bridge let the gorgeous morning sun light the bridge, water, and sky for our background.
There was a wooded trail nearby, and the sunlight dappling through the trees seemed like a good idea to me, but it offered some challenges, so we didn't stay there long. We got a few good shots there.
In just that first spot, we pretty much used our hour allotted to the session, but everyone was getting comfortable and wanted to see the other locations, so we didn't even think about stopping. The more "urban" setting up the street nearer the Donsco buildings was the next location on my list. Ben was really interested in having everyone hold him in a photograph, so I decided we could make that happen pretty easily in this setup. He looks quite pleased with himself.
To end hour two of our shoot, we hit our third location at the little gardens near the John Wright Store. The sun was getting pretty high and bright by this time, so my first shots taken on the sunny side of the garden didn't come out well -- everyone was squinting into the sun, so we turned it around 180 degrees and shot with the sun and gardens behind the family. This is where we took the opportunity to theme up the shoot: everyone got into their pink t-shirts, and I got out the flowing pink cloth to float in the wind. In reality, the wind was too still to blow the cloth around as I had envisioned, but we managed a few tricks.
Our very last location was across the street near the old kilns. Here we kept the pink theme and lined the men up behind Beth.
After 3 hours, Rich was still coming up with ideas for images, but it was time to pack it up. Everyone had had a good time, but breakfast was long overdue, especially for the boys.
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