Yesterday the Help-Portrait group that I started that is serving the MUSC Children’s Hospital held it’s second event of the holiday season (we did two because we could). This time it was a whole new group of photogs who volunteered for the event – Eugene Mah (who also has shared a set of photos from the event on his site), Kristi Heupel, Drew Anderson, and my lovely wife Amy Nienstedt joined my big bald self in taking shots of the awesome kids, families, nurses, and staff members at MUSC.

Everything started smoothly, we had a brief scare when they tested the fire alarm (last week we had to endure an actual alarm that was pretty frightening), but we were able to get set up quickly and started shooting right away. The biggest scare was when I forgot to instruct one adorable little girl to stay on the panel board floor I had put down on the white seamless backdrop. The poor thing walked right into the seamless paper and nearly brought the whole thing down on herself! Luckily we were able to swiftly get her out of there and we patched things up quickly – another reason why having a group of photogs on hand is great! Other than that things went very smoothly – we learned from last week’s event and brought more laptops so we could wrap up the editing and delivery of the photos much more efficiently. We also had the wherewithal to grab some shots of ourselves as well as the staff at the Children’s Hospital, who are an awesome group of people who give their hearts to these kids every single day.

I don’t need to go into too much about how this makes me feel, you can read this post about it, but I just wanted to say that we’re all here now on this planet together and no matter what cards life has handed you, we all need to look at the gifts we have and celebrate them.