The Greatest Compliment

I finally get to post about my photo shoot with the family I shot for Trading Graces.  Let me first fill you in a little about Trading Graces and say that this is going to be a two part post.  The first part will be to show you the portraits and the second to show you the project.

Trading Graces is the brainstorm of my BFF Lora.  The two of us used to love watching Trading Spaces.  Remember that show?  Where neighbors would swap houses and redo a room in the others house under the direction of a designer for $1000?  Lora is a fantastic designer (I can’t even hang a picture without checking with Lora! She’s good.) and she came up with the idea of doing that as a service project through her church.  They pick someone in their church who gives more than they take and needs a new kitchen or whatever (although I think every single one has been a kitchen or more) and just love all over them by blessing them with a new space.  So Trading Graces was born.  I don’t know what it is like at their other service projects since I only help out with this one but the people at Northshore Baptist get so into Trading Graces!  You would not believe the amount of volunteers who do everything from bringing meals to major contract work to cleaning the bathrooms.  I makes you feel all warm being around all that Love.

So this particular project was for a dear family who needed help with their house.  The description “dear family” is the best way to describe them.  They are so “dear” and loved by their community.  And I felt very fortunate to get to take their photos for this project.  They have three kids and two of their kids have special needs.  The oldest and the youngest.  They were a challenge to shoot because I couldn’t really get them to look at me.  They are both legally blind so I’m sure someone who they don’t know pointing a black shiny thing at them and calling their name isn’t really the best situation.  So I quickly gave up having them look at the camera which is so fine with me because I like getting shots of kids playing anyway.  I’d rather just be an observer.

C was in constant motion.  She dances and prances and hugs.  This is the shot I got of her that we used for the photo wall.

I love it because it looks like she is sitting still but her hair betrays that fact that it is really more of a very quick pause.   And then I got one of her hugging her mom.  I used this one for the photo wall too.  We did all the photos in B&W for the wall but I actually prefer this one in color because I think C is color.

And one last one which I love again because I think it captures C.  I’m calling this one “Drinking Sunshine”.

Then there was T.  He brought a truck to play with.  We didn’t use this one for the wall but this is my favorite one of him.

This is the one we use for the wall only in the color version.  Can you stand it?!!

OK. Now onto J.  He brought a book about music and was buried in this well loved book pretty much the whole session.  This is the photo that we used for the wall of J.

And now for what I think is one of the best photo of my life.  I can’t seem to get this photo big enough so you can see the quote on the book but it says “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent” – Victor Hugo.  J has a hard time being understood and music is very important to him…

His mom said of this photo – “I have never seen anything that has more captured the soul of an individual in a photo.”  Sigh.  The Greatest Compliment.