Photography

Feast 2005 – Photography

Paul Derksen & Laura Olivar

We were fortunate that the Feast Committee had made arrangements to get the stocks over to Roberts Park. As noted in previous write-ups, it seems like the photographers would be responsible for getting the stocks to the Feast location but I think it really needs to be on the checklist for the Feast Committee. If one of the photographers happens to have a truck and can transport the stocks - great; otherwise someone on the committee should have it on their checklist as part of the overall plan.
Our biggest challenge was to make sure we got all the children through the stocks as it is not noted as an 'activity' on their checklists for the day and it probably should be. We did manage to get all of them but only because between the two of us we happen to know all the kids; it was a challenge finding them as all activities are kind of spread out.
Also, make sure that the list you receive is complete, especially when there are split classes involved as there were this year - a child might accidentally be left off as they're not in the teacher's 'regular' class.
It's important to find a good location for the stocks as you want it to be in the sun but you also want to avoid getting hard shadows on their faces as you take the pictures. Given that the event takes place in a very wooded area, it's also important to ensure you're set up in a way that you don't have branches 'growing' out of kid's heads as you're taking the pictures.
In addition to making sure we got all the kids through the stocks, we went out to take a lot of candid pictures during the day as well. At the end when each child makes a little speech, we set up right up front so we were able to take a picture of each child as they did their speech. What's important is to have a tripod and to set up low so you can really get each individual kid in a picture. The bright-green grass of the baseball field is an excellent background and it really allows the picture to focus in on each child with no background noise. Sometimes there will be more than one child performing the speech in which case you may want to take a couple extra pictures just to make sure you get a good one of each of them.
As for equipment, use a digital camera, and we would both agree a digital SLR is the best, especially if you have a zoom lens for it. It allows you not to have to worry about how many pictures you take as you will go through them later on to select the best pictures. Between the two of us, we took over 750 pictures that day. In the end we printed about 180 pictures total - for each child one picture in the stocks, one of the speech and 1 to 3 candids depending on how good they were. Total cost, including shipping, about $36, about 20 cents per print all-in. We used an online photo services, in this case Yahoo! Photos - there's also - at the time of writing - Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly and Snapfish. Kodak Gallery and Snapfish both print on Kodak paper; Shutterfly and Yahoo both print on Fuji paper; quality-wise there is very little difference between each one, so it really comes down to price and Yahoo and Snapfish were by far the cheapest. We picked Yahoo because of convenience and prior experience.

Prior Feasts:

Photography 2005
Photography 2004
Photography 2003
Photography 2002
Photography 2001
Photography 1999
Photography 1998
Photography 1997

Having a single list of children, alphabetized by first name (or rather the name the child goes by) would help a lot.

Do not just get three class lists, without having the overall list alphabetized - it makes life difficult.