Bethany Care Centre Portraits by the Cochrane Camera Club
November 23, 2019
What better Yuletide gift for loved ones than a classic portrait of your most senior family members?
Just a month before Christmas, Cochrane Camera Club volunteers brought their best photographic gear and talents to the Bethany seniors residence to do those portraits. The year before, the Club had taken the initiative to do this as a community service and it was very popular. The response this year was overwhelming, with over 70 residents posing for us either on their own or with family members! Even Santa Claus got in the picture!
Joan and Keith Fox, club members and professional photographers, worked with Pat Johnston and our club president Wendi Forster scouting out stations for the “sittings”. Just as important, they set about creating a computer room where real-time post-processing and printing would take place.
It worked quite well. Most of the residents had their 5×7” framed pictures the same day!
This was a personal photo challenge for most of us: the lighting varied from station to station, as did the seating arrangement. Marc Lattoni added a new dimension by making a video starring some of the residents! Settings included a church, sun room, hall way, and a grand piano in the cafeteria!
All in all we had seven stations each with a team consisting of a photographer and an assistant, plus the video set, and the computer/processing room where Pat perfected the images for Keith to print! To coordinate it all, Wendi and Joan were our “Rovers”, checking in to make sure we were OK, and being the liason with the staff and management from Bethany Centre.
Despite a few glitches, we collectively managed to produce lovely framed photos for the residents as well as providing the Centre with a digital copy of related images with family members included. These were for the residents and their families and the Bethany Centre for viewing and printing on their computers.
We’re not sure who was enjoying the day most of all–our “models”–or our Club members doing the picture-taking and arranging the poses!
We thank the special effort by Keith and Joan Fox, who coached the amateur portrait photographers as to the finer aspects of getting a good image, Pat Johnston for his post-processing skills, and Wendi Forster for the organizational and leadership skills, spending considerable time and effort setting up the whole activity and coordinating our time with the staff and management at the Centre.
Those of us who took part will remember it as a touching moment, a learning exercise, and an feel-good contribution to our community members that are residents at Bethany. We all came away from that day with a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction in knowing our efforts were appreciated .
It seems the more you give your time and talent to photography, the more it gives back to you!