Guest blog by Alex Luyckx
I have been for the past two years involved with the Help-Portrait Movement in my hometown of Milton Ontario. Help-Portrait was started three years ago by photographer Jeremy Cowart aimed to provide professional portraits free of charge to those less fortunate or those who would not usually get their portrait taken, with no cost to the people. This is achieved by pooling the resources of local photographers with big hearts. Although primarily aimed at digital shooters, I decided to throw in a bit of an analog flare.
At the Milton event on November 26th, I brought along my trusty Polaroid Automatic 250 Land Camera. Since I was working mostly outdoors I chose the FP-100c film stock to shoot on and would gather the family outside, pose them and then take their photo with the 250 and pass the still developing film pack to one of the family members to hold while I did the digital photos of them. Making sure to keep them outside long enough for the image to develop. Once done I would ask for the pack back and peel off their freshly made print. The results were nothing short of magic, as most had never seen such a Polaroid camera or had not seen one in several years. But it definitely brought a smile to their faces, which in the end was all that mattered to me.
If you want to know more about the Help-Portrait movement visit their site at: http://help-portrait.com/
I hopefully will get some practice in before next year’s event with using studio strobes and film and shoot all my images on Kodak Portra 160.
Long-time FPP listener Alex Luyckx works both in Information Technology support and as a freelance photographer. He describes himself as an analog photographer stuck in a digital world. He picked up photography in 2002 with the purchase of an old film camera at a garage sale and hasn’t looked back since. When he’s not stuck at work he enjoys capturing abandoned buildings on film, and researching and telling their stories for anyone who will listen or read those stories.