Wednesday. Hump day. Once we get here, we have the momentum to get through the rest of the week. But sometimes momentum is a little bigger than Monday to Friday. For Fox Chase Cancer Center, momentum is the idea they used to encapsulate their work for the 2015 annual report, and they called on photographer Colin M. Lenton to take the photographs to accompany it.
Colin was brought onto the project by design firm B&G Design Studios, who found him a few months earlier on Wonderful Machine. He had already done a few portraits for Fox Chase Cancer Center, and one of them was exactly the look they wanted for the annual report, so they knew he would be perfect for this project. Colin felt it was a perfect fit, too, when he found out that the theme for the report was momentum. He’s always had an interest in environmental portraits where the environment has motion blur, and he knew that technique would be great for capturing the visual concept they were looking for.
From preproduction to post, the shoot took about 3-4 weeks. It started with scouting locations around the hospital and deciding what images could illustrate which articles. Then it came to scheduling the shoots, which was a bit of a task given the hectic schedules of the hospital employees. Colin says that Fox Chase was incredibly helpful with scheduling, and with his own team remaining flexible with schedule changes, they were able to get the shots they needed.
For the shot above, Colin and his team arrived to the location just as a cold rain and heavy wind started picking up. They considered using other locations within the hospital, but ultimately they knew that they wanted the scene to take place on a street corner, fully immersed in the community. Wanting to get a shot with the sun shining brightly off the building, and without buckets of rain pouring on the subject, they rescheduled this shoot. Colin says they, fortunately, had built in extra time to the shoot schedule, so issues like this were not a big deal.
Fox Chase let Colin know they’ve been getting a huge amount of compliments on the report, specifically regarding the photography. Moving forward, Colin hopes to continue his relationship with them and create more portraits to show off the people in the health and wellness fields.
I hope that I capture a warmth or welcoming spirit on behalf of my subjects.
To view more of Colin’s work, visit colinmlenton.com!