sanfran

Guillaume Desachy, San Francisco, CA:

On Saturday I was part of the +Help-Portrait day and more specifically the one organized by First Exposures in San Francisco, an organization which is helping under-served kids to learn photography. Each kid is a mentee who has a mentor assigned. They meet every Saturday morning and the mentors teach their mentee either film or digital photography.

So, for the edition of Help-Portrait I was part of, the kids were the ones taking pictures and the adults were only here to mentor them ;)

And I gotta tell you, the kids were pretty damn good!

My Saturday was going smoothly, I had been a photo manager in the morning and in the afternoon, I was a runner, showing people the steps to follow to get their portrait taken.

That’s when the precious ladies showed up! They were a multi-generation family of about 8 people.

While registering, we asked them if they wanted their make-up done. Some of them had already some make-up on and some had not. So at first, none of them really wanted to get any make-up. But when I showed them the make-up room, that was a different story!

Princess, the lady sitting in the top-left photo was at first really reticent to have any make-up. But when she saw the amazing job the make-up artists did on her daughter, she just could not resist. She was so funny, admiring herself in the mirror, saying “Oh, I am so beautiful.” They were cracking me up so much!

Then came the hairdresser room, as for the make-up room, nobody wanted to get their hair done at first but in the end they almost all did it!

After about two hours of preparation, they were finally ready to get their portraits taken! And what gorgeous models they were, that was incredible, they were rocking the stage! ;) They were getting more and more posing ideas!

Then, I walked them to the post-processing station and it was a tough choice for them to decide which picture to get printed! In the bottom-right picture, we can see Precious admiring one of her pictures!

And after that, their picture got printed and framed. I cannot describe the amount of pride and joy people had when they were walking away with their photo framed!

And I was also really proud to be part of such a great day! Thanks Jeremy Cowart and Help-Portrait, the Help-Portrait family is incredible!