Day 139 – Final Project

I didn’t want to post this until the results were in. (And yes, the last photo was taken today). What follows are just thirteen of the approximately 400 photos I took of the event and the days leading up to it.

Final Project – ART 235
Medical Outreach Response Event
April 13 – 14, 2012
Silver Stage High School, Silver Springs, NV

Organizers and Volunteers
Christy (right) is the Director of the Healthy Communities Coalition. Freida (left) runs the Dayton Food bank and was the instigating force for the event. She wondered, What good did it do to give people food if they couldn’t chew it? Freida was the volunteer organizer and logistics person for the event.

Wendy organized the professionals (dentists, doctors, nurses, optometrists, etc). She is the head of Community Roots.

Rita was one of a couple hundred extraordinary volunteers. Here she is calling people who registered late for the event to let them know what services would be available.<

The Event – Friday, April 13 (12 – 5pm) & Saturday, April 14 (9am – 5pm)

Community Health Nurses consult with one another in preparation for the MORE event.

One of the dentists and his assistants heading out to the mobile dental van.

Wendy cannot contain her excitement after getting a look at the dental van. It really was amazing. It was a complete, modern dental office (five chairs) on wheels.

There were so many who needed dental work, that it was meted out via lottery tickets. On day one 8 numbers were drawn every half hour. The dentists did their best to keep up, but many clients with tickets had not been served by the end of the first day, so those patients came back the next day, as did anyone else who had a lottery ticket in the raffle can. There was no way all who needed help were going to be seen. And yet the people waited and hoped. Once their number was called, it was still a long wait and I saw some people who had been standing in line on Friday morning still waiting for dental treatment on Saturday at 4pm when I left , No one who was lucky enough to get their number called complained. They waited and waited and waited until they finally saw the dentist. And among those lucky enough to get their ticket pulled, well, in some cases they gave their place to someone else in their family whose needs were more urgent.

One client speaking to a volunteer at the lottery table.

Other services were also offered. Immunizations were by far the most popular after dental work.

We had optometrists on hand as well. The Lions Club volunteers did vision testing and screening, and prospective patients were sent back to the optometrists.

Dental work was, by far, the most requested and labor intensive service offered at MORE 2012.

Mark needed a filling in his front incisor.

Dr. Brad Munninger of Desert Valley Dental in Fernley worked his magic.

Mark’s reaction was pretty typical of all the dental patients. Big smiles, hugs, and even some tears.

“If I cannot eat, cannot smile, cannot kiss without pain, do you think I can work, attend school, participate in the normal affairs of my family, peers and community?”

~ Shaun Griffin

I was very proud to have done this project and I’m honored the organizers trusted me to do the event justice. I’m happy with the result, but more than that, I’m happy that the photographs I took will be used to influence support for further events of this type in the near future, and legislation and change in the coming years.

Icing on the cake:

Day 133 – Big boy toys and my first paid job – UPDATE

Sweetie is a radio-control airplane aficionado and in recent months has joined a club of like-minded guys. This means I lose him for hours at a time on weekends, but I’m happy he’s got a hobby and friends outside of the home. The club held its first annual Fun Fly today and I was asked to photograph the event. I took a couple hundred photos and am still going through them. Just one from the batch is below. I’ll link to them later when I’ve got them all processed and ready to go.

One of the guys flying his plane.

The other exciting news is that I had my first PAID job today! My friend is starting back to work as a consultant and needed some headshots done. Here are a couple of my favorites. Unfortunately, WordPress in “crunching” my images has made them cooler and more washed out than they should be. I’ve broken down and set up a SmugMug account, and when I can, I will link to the photos. (UPDATE: I have replaced all the photos below with linked-to SmugMug photos. The difference is clear. The colors are as they should be.)

Just so you know I’m not imagining the color difference, the photo below is after WordPress is through “crunching” it.

It wasn’t all serious . . . we had some fun too!

Day 118 – Starting to get the hang of it

If you can stand another self-portrait. I’m fascinated with shallow depth of field portraiture, so I was experimenting today – on myself again since I had no one else at hand. I’ll have to try this on Sweetie this weekend, if he’ll let me. I think I could get better results if I didn’t have to rely on auto-focus to get the shot.

I shot this in my office. Lighting: diffused daylight to camera right and I held a large white box cover camera left to fill in the shadows on my right side (your left). Shot at ISO 100, 1/60s at f/2.2. The extremely shallow DOF puts my eyes in focus but makes the rest of my face and hair quickly fall off into blur, and even my nose is slightly out of focus. I really like this effect when I see it, and from what I’ve read, can be an effective technique when shooting the “mature” face.

Day 113 – Photo Shoot

I needed to get stronger shots of two of the women who were key organizers of the MOR event I photographed last weekend. We met at the Dayton Community Center and spent about an hour and a half shooting. My husband was my able assistant, and I couldn’t have done this shoot without him manipulating the reflector.

One of the black and whites I will use for my final project. The color is just for fun.

Edited to add. I swear WordPress does something to photos. These photos have an odd bluish tinge to them that is absent in Photoshop, Facebook and on my Flickr page.

In the print lab

We are supposed to bring in a couple of “tentative” prints for our final project tonight, so I was in the print lab last night processing and printing. When this one came out of the printer, I stopped short. He is just one of the couple hundred people who came for dental treatment at the MOR event last weekend. He was one of the lucky ones – his number in the lottery was drawn.

As you can see, his face reflects a life I can’t know anything about, but he was kind and he was gentle and he trusted me to take his picture.

I have no idea if WordPress is going to do this fellow justice. I love how the actual photograph came out.

Day 106 – Serendipity

Sometimes you just get a lucky shot.

A friend of mine posted a link to this Virtual Lighting Studio (be patient…it takes a while to load). Of course, I had to play with it. What’s really cool about it is that once you find a look you like, you can save it as a jpeg. When you open said jpeg, you see not only your image, but a diagram on where to place the lights to get the same effect. Pretty nifty, huh?

And so you know, I felt the call to try it out. I clamped a dark blanket to our living room windows to block out the bits of sunlight that leaked through the wooden blinds. I shoved the hutch away from the tall wall and pushed the sofa and love seat to each side of the room. I grabbed my studio lights and set them up, along with my camera.

“NO!” I told myself. “Get your taxes done. THEN you can play. And while you’re at it, start some laundry.”

Sigh. Okay…

I quickly worked through our taxes (and lo and behold, we’re getting a bit back – taking a couple of photography classes at the university does have other benefits!)

I finally was able to get going, and just had some fun for a bit. But the best moment was when Maya jumped up onto the chair I’d been posing in. She’s a bit shorter than I am.

As for what I was trying to accomplish in session today…highlights in my hair and a defined jawline. It’s all about seeing the light.

Main light (soft box) was in front of me to camera left and high, angled down. Second light (soft box as well) was behind me and to camera right. Slightly lower than the main light. This light got moved quite a bit during the session to try to give me what I was going for. I moved it closer, raised it, brightened and dimmed it.

I know I'm not smiling, but look at the highlight on my cheek, and my jaw looks great!

I really like the highlight along the right side of my face. Nicely lit hair too.

I'm liking the hair and the cheekbones.

Day 105 – Antonn

My eyes are very tired from two days of photography, and I’ve still got a lot of photographs to go through and process, but Antonn deserves special mention. Antonn is sixteen years old and the sweetest kid. And he’s true to his word. He promised that he would provide music at the MOR event, and yesterday, when he realized he didn’t have a ride, he strapped his guitar to his back and hopped on his bike to ride the twenty miles from Dayton to Silver Stage High School where the event was being held. One of our key organizers saw him peddling in the cold and wind as she was driving in. She caught him at about the ten-mile mark. If she hadn’t seen him, he would have pedaled the entire twenty miles. We had a lot of dedicated volunteers for this event, but this kid gives special meaning to the phrase “going the extra mile.”

Day 104 – Before and After

I’ve been at the Medical Outreach Response Event all day; and I will be there all day again tomorrow. I took a lot of pictures, and it will take me awhile to get through them all. By far the largest number of people who attended came for dental work. We had so many requests, that we had to go to a lottery system. Those tickets were gold. One of the lucky ones was Mark who allowed me to photograph his session with Dr. Brad. Mark is an incredible guy with a happy outlook on life even with all that it has thrown at him.

Mark got a filling on his front incisor.

Here is the before . . .