Michael Schoenfeld has been working with the Children’s Miracle Network for 15 years. Therefore, he has built a fantastic working relationship with its team. CMN, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, is a charity that provides medical care through a network of hospitals across the United States and Canada.
Since he shot a similar assignment for the charity a year prior, Michael was asked, for this project, to shoot images for CMN to appear in Walmart. The goal of this project was to capture portraits of the children who have survived severe medical treatments, funded by CMN. The children are in thirteen cities across Canada from coast to coast. The difference between this shoot and the one Michael completed a year ago, is that last time the children all traveled to Toronto, where Michael captured all the images at once. This time around, they asked Michael to go to the Children’s homes across Canada and take their photos there.
Luckily, Michael has a great team of people he works with who handle the travel logistics. They planned out how to get to each child’s home, in addition to where his team would lodge along the way. This was a lot of traveling. Michael and his team visited Tsawwassen, British Columbia, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto, Dorchester, Niagara Falls, Gatineau QC, Ottawa, Cowansville, Halifax, Paradise, and Newfoundland.
Michael spent most of his time in airport security. Within the given time frame, he traveled to different locations and accomplished two shoots a day. Canada is a huge country and visiting so many diverse places in such a short time frame was difficult.
All of the images were expected to have a similar look as if shot in a studio environment, so I had to travel with a portable studio rig, twice a day to a different city.
Halfway through the project, two of the children’s schedules conflicted with Michael’s. Once everyone agreed on new shoot dates, Michael returned to Canada for five more days to wrap up the assignment.
This project was tightly slated. However, Michael was sure to find time to complete his personal work along the way, too.
As I travel, I always allow time for me to go out on the streets and shoot personal work; portraits of people I meet: I always ask for their participation. Those images, from fifteen years of worldwide travel, have become my most prized element of my life as a photographer.
See more of Michael’s photography on his website.
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