The Wandering I

The mission of Flashes of Hope is to photograph every child who is diagnosed with cancer each year.  Certainly going into 40 childrens hospitals every month is one way to approach that goal.  But an even better tact is to go to the special camps that are around the country where these children can go for a week and just be regular kids at camp enjoying all of the wonderful activities that any summer camp has for kids.  When FOH goes to a camp for a photo session, it’s usually anywhere from 8 to 15 photographers who descend on the camp and they try to photograph upwards of 200 kids in a morning.

Earlier in the summer, the National Office asked me if I would be willing to work [actually it was something like "here's what we want to do and thank you so much for volunteering to do it" before I could come up with any kind of response! ] on organizing a shoot at Camp Happy Times, the camp that The Valerie Fund here in New Jersey has held for for their kids for the last 23 years out in the Poconos.  I was able to line up six photographers/friends and then the National Office was able to get three more photographers who were local to the camp and it was a wonderful time!

We all went out to the camp on Sunday and got the “lay of the land” so that we’d be able to hit the ground running on Monday morning [it was a three hour drive out there for most of us].  We were each planning on shooting 20 to 24 kids apiece between 9 am and 11:30 so it was really going to be a fast and furious shoot to get it all accomplished!

I had gotten the name of a really nice local restaurant, Matthew’s on Main from some of the people in the area and FOH took us out to dinner the night before the shoot.  It was a really nice time for all of us shooters, getting to know one another and just talking shop as all photogs do when they get together.  The food was excellent and there were two outstanding gelatin silver prints [the old fashioned kind made in a wet darkroom, not this new fangled digital "Giclee" print stuff!].  I was a bit anxious about the shoot and afew other details, so I didn’t eat very much but I was mesmerised by the image of Miles Davis that was over our table.

I ended up not shooting very many kids at the camp and several of the other shooters carried the bulk of the work but, as always, it was an absolute pleasure to work with Lisa Cencula from the National Office and to photograph these kids!

Nat

Somewhere in rural New Jersey