Taylor - Blog #4

Oops. Thought I posted this on Wednesday but I guess I didn't.

This week so far truthfully hasn’t been too, too exciting. On Monday, I continued adding photographers and their photos onto the Flashes of Hope website. When I started working on this project and began looking through all of the photos from many shoots, one of the women I work closely with warned me about coming across a photo of a child whose information box (which is underneath every picture) said “deceased.” Unfortunately, that happened for the first time on Monday. Even though I was warned ahead of time about that happening, it was still extremely hard to see and especially hard to forget. I ended up updating the photographers for every chapter, and even though it took a long time to do, it was nice knowing that completing that project was really helpful for the Flashes staff since everyone is so busy with other projects.

Yesterday, I worked on another project with Hannah, the Chapter Director and Public Relations Coordinator. In order to continue working towards its goal, “to photograph every child until every child is cured,” Flashes must make sure that each chapter photographs at least, but hopefully more pediatric cancer patients than the previous year. So, I had to go through the photo shoot logs from every chapter and record the number of patients that have been photographed thus far in 2011. If the current numbers of photographed children for a certain chapter were unusually low compared to previous years, then I researched and tried to figure out different ways to increase those numbers until the chapter is back on track. For example, the Indianapolis chapter is currently having trouble with attendance at photo shoots. So, I Googled and researched any upcoming events for pediatric cancer patients that will be taking place in or around Indianapolis that Flashes of Hope could attend to photograph many children in one or two days. Initially, I had a lot of trouble finding events that were actually for the patients themselves since many of the events surrounding pediatric cancer are fundraising events for donors and hospital representatives. However, I eventually narrowed down my search and began finding events such as picnics and mini-camps/sports days for the patients. Hopefully, should their budget permit, Flashes of Hope representatives/chapter directors and the volunteer photographers, makeup artists and stylists will be able to attend these events to photograph many patients.