I had the pleasure of not only organizing a Help-Portrait event at MUSC Children’s Hospital again this year, but also of volunteering as a shooter for the Charleston Help-Portrait group at the Convoy of Hope event on James Island. I want to share some of my favorite shots from the day.

This was a lot different from the event I organized. I was one of three shooters, we had 2 editors, registration volunteers, and a makeup artist all in one tent!

Here are a couple of shots from my phone of the other two shooters at the event:

Doug DeLong

Hansje Gold-Krueck

I also got to shoot some other event volunteers, such as these mimes who were performing:

As well as the local fire department:

I shot a lot of families. It can be challenging to get a group to fit within the borders of a portable collapsible background. There was a lot of convincing on my part to get people as close as possible to each other. Luckily, that also usually got people laughing right away.

When shooting kids, I tried to get them to also pose without their parents so they could let their personalities show. Something about taking a picture with adults makes kids squirm, but when they’re with other kids they really seem to open up.

I also shot a little differently than I did with the MUSC event. I shot in JPEG normal to make the file sizes smaller and also let the camera handle the JPEG conversions to speed up the processing. I shot over 54 different subjects – and I was one of 3 photogs! Needless to say the editors were very busy.

The other change I made was to slightly bump up my ISO to 250 to make my flashes work a little less. I worked 7 hours and never had to change the batteries!

I have to say, it’s nice to let someone else worry about leading every once and a while. Being a professional means a lot more than just taking pictures! For this event though, I just had to worry about setting up and making people smile. I still love leading, but it was nice to have a break from the “business” end of things for a change.

All in all it was a really successful event. I had a blast, and the subjects I interacted with were all unique and interesting people from all walks of life. I didn’t get a chance to check out the rest of the event, although we had a stage right next to our tent so we were jamming to lots of gospel music, which I was enjoying to the point of ridiculousness (although that could have been the exhaustion kicking in). Everybody was in such high spirits though that it was hard not to have a sore face from smiling all day long. You can view the rest of my portraits from the event here.