One of the reasons for going to Romania was because I had offered my services to photograph the children in the orphanage at Campulung. These kids had probably never had a professional portrait taken of them in their lives. As we all know, having a great portrait of yourself can do wonders for your self-esteem! What better way to share with someone who speaks a different language than you do, that they are loved unconditionally and that they are uniquely and wonderfully made, than to give them a beautiful portrait of themselves?!? So I brought a small lighting kit with 2-Manfrotto 5001B light stands, 2-Westcott Collapsible Umbrellas, and 2-SB800 strobes. All of this stored perfectly into my ultra-compact lighting kit, which you can see here with the rest of the gear I took: https://chrisandcami.com/blog/2010/07/30/packing-for-romania/. I used a white window curtain with the sun back-lighting it for a nice high-key background. Along with this setup, we brought a small Canon Selphy die-sub printer, thanks to Erika. I set my D3 up so that one CF card slot was recording RAW files, and the other was recording a duplicate medium sized JPG file. As I photographed each child, Terry would take the card with the JPG image, help them pick out their favorite, and instantly pop out a print for them. Then Erika would take it over and help them place it in one of the colorful frames she’d brought. They LOVED IT!!! We were so blessed to see the excitement on their faces as they walked out and showed their portrait to their friends. J
