Two Days on Location

I'll be spending today and tomorrow at the Stephenson Cancer Center photographing cancer survivors. Some are through with treatment and "cured," some "in remission," and some still in treatment. I am looking forward to hearing their stories and creating their portraits. I have found it to be a tremendous blessing and privilege to spend time with other cancer survivors. Most are very passionate about the life they came too close to losing.

I've done several survivor portraits over the past couple of years as I have worked to get this project up and going. We have a dozen sessions on the schedule for the next two days. Most will be relationship portraits of the survivor with someone who has been particularly supportive of them during their journey, like you've seen on our blog, website and the Portraits of Hope Facebook page.

It's my desire and my prayer that this would be an on-going project. Right now, we're just working on the start-up phase. The display of 20 images will be premiered, hopefully at the Cancer Center, in the not-to-distant future (will announce the date as soon as we can nail it down). It will then be a traveling exhibit, set up in high traffic businesses around the Metro where it can draw attention to the fight against cancer and hopefully draw even more traffic into those businesses.

I do want to offer a quick "disclaimer" about the images themselves. When photographers discovered digital several years ago, we tried a wide variety of techniques, just to see what we could do, and to carve out new niches in the marketplace. One of the techniques was "selective color" - where the image is in black and white except for one area of the photo, usually just one color, chosen for impact. As more and more people got digital cameras and photo-editing software, and many of them proclaimed themselves to be professionals, they began to copy many of those techniques. Selective color seemed to be one of their favorites and has been somewhat overdone, and very often poorly done. It honestly makes me a little uncomfortable using that technique for this project.
However, I believe that when properly used to create impact and communicate a particular message, almost any photographic technique has its place if done well. I earnestly hope that the color in these images will contribute to the story and the emotion, and not be a distraction. It isn't there just because I can do it, or to look cute and artsy. It's there to set these images apart from other black and white relationship images and show that these relationships took on even greater depth because of a specific struggle.