About Help Portrait- Saturday at RED Ahead in Cedar Rapids, IA

Last Saturday, I had a chance to participate in something unique. Thanks to dynamic Activity Officer of LAPC and all around great organizer, Amy and DJ, Cedar Rapids became the part of the Help Portrait. Help Portrait is a movement, a chance for photographers, editors, make up artist etc to give something back to people in need during holiday season. All those people get together for a day, to take portraits and give them to those who otherwise would not be able to afford it, for free.

Our RED Ahead location was one of three in Cedar Rapids. Under direction of Lisa, there were 5 photographers shooting, along with assistants, editors (including me and Tomasz), and a large number of volunteers to keep everything going smoot on the outside of the “photo studio”.

It was a great fun to get to know (or meet agian!) so many local photographers- Kaylyn, Sarah, Angie and their assistants and photography enthusisasts – Mari, Crystal, Joe and others. And there is probably far more people I did not even get a chance to meet at all, spending whole afternoon with eyes glued to the screen, cropping, skin softening, sharpening and whatever I had time to play with.

To my disappointment, we were not printing the portraits at our location. The photos will be delivered sometime this week, in form of CD and hard copies. Because of that, I did not get a chance to interact with people who came. This made my experience to be more of idea then real thing- thus no stories to share, just observations of life of professional photographer…

Before the whole thing started, though, I had a minute to take a couple of behind the scenes photos and had fun with other volunteers in our group. Also, Tomasz had a GoPro set-up to record a time lapse of what was going on in one corner of our location.

More stories from other participants in Cedar Rapids group will be showing on the Facebook page, including this moving video by Sam Fathallah.