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Articles Tagged with: MUSC kids

Angel Walk 2011

On Saturday, May 21st the 2nd Annual Angel Walk took place over in Hampton Park in Charleston, SC. Questioning the predicted rapture for that day, I felt the best way to find out firsthand was to walk with Angels… OK, bad jokes aside, the Angel Walk is actually a fundraising and awareness event to fight medulloblastoma, which is the most common malignant central nervous system tumor in children.

I found out about Dawn Sechevich (pictured above on the left) and her son’s story through my neighbors who are close friends with her. Her boy, Luke James Sechevich, was diagnosed with high risk medulloblastoma on January 30, 2006 at the age of 1-½. After a long battle, Luke passed away in January of 2008. Dawn organized the Angel walk for Luke and all children who battle this disease in the hopes that they will someday find a cure. Read the full story on the Angel Walk website. Here’s a clip of her story from Lowcountry Live:

Let’s talk about the event, which was an uplifting and fun-filled family day in the park. There were a lot of activities for the kids, great food, and performances throughout the morning. Face painting, hair spraying, caricatures, the King of Pops, and jumping cows!

The Djole Dance & Drum Company livened up the event with African beats and dancing:

The Charleston Police Pipes & Drums band stormed the event with a fantastic set of traditional bagpipe music…

Melinda Gay & Dawn Sechevich pose for a shot with the band:

One of the highlights of the event for me was the singing of the gospel choir that closed out the day. There really is nothing quite like a southern gospel group to make you feel like you can believe in anything.

There were a lot of other people involved in making this event happen, especially the doctors and staff from MUSC Children’s Hospital as well as all of the sponsors who donated money and vendors who donated their services and products. Make sure to browse through the Angel Walk website and throw some support to all of the sponsors on there.

While I do have a big old set of photos on Flickr, I have an even bigger, more thorough set of pictures in my gallery with the ability to download for all of those who participated!

Don’t forget, you can always donate some money at any time through this charity, so please help them out, and tell all of your friends to “Like” them on Facebook as well!

Thoughts On Today’s Help-Portrait Event

Before I start, I just want to credit the photographers who took the pictures in the diptych above. John Lindroth took the photo on the left of Krista Leapold, myself, and Kathy Hare, and Kathy Hare took the photo of me on the right. John, Kathy, & Krista all joined me to photograph children and their families at the MUSC Children’s Hospital this morning.

I have to go ahead and say that we had an absolute blast doing this today. In fact, it was a major highlight of my journey behind the lens so far. The families were genuinely grateful and excited to get their pictures taken. The looks of joy on the kid’s faces was worth more than anything tangible in this world. I wish I could share some of the pictures that Kathy & John took of the kids checking out their photos on the back of my camera’s LCD screen. Their joy was matched only by the joy in my own face as I looked at their reactions. I felt like a parent on Christmas morning watching his children open up their gifts. But the pictures we made today are for the people we photographed and are not mine to show, so I can only share my words with you.

To be able to share our passion for photography and creativity with people like those that we served today is why most of us ever decide to make photographs. We want people to share in a moment of time that we stopped forever because it meant something to us at that point. Little gifts like this will hopefully make the experiences these children are enduring filled with enough highlights that their passion for life will burn stronger than the illness that put them there.

Unlike the other local Help-Portrait group that is serving the Charleston Convoy of Hope on December 11th, we did not serve hundreds of people today (they did an amazing job last year and are estimating over 1,000 subjects at this years event). This gave us the opportunity to not only create professional portraits, but also take candid editorial style photos of the kids during the event. We were lucky to photograph every kid that was not confined to their rooms, which was amazing. They each got a CD filled with the pictures we made, and the hospital also got a DVD of all of the pictures we took so they can use them any way they want to.

I shared a bunch of pictures in yesterday’s post that are similar to what I was doing today, so because Krista was helping out today I present a picture I took of her being her bright and cheery self. Thanks for reading!