One of the better things to happen in the past year for my wife and me has been the relocation of our local grocery store, the Seward Coop. Not only is it only three blocks from us now; it’s also twice as big, with amazing all-Minnesota meat counter (with the best hand made sausages in the city), a great deli, amazing selections of the whole world of organic and sustainable food. Basically it’s everything we want in a place to buy our food.

Which is one of the reasons I’m so excited to be working with them on their imagery – you can see the first newsletter I shot for them in PDF form here. The other reasons to be excited: great people who are fully willing to collaborate on the vision of a story, a mission that I wholeheartedly believe in right in my backyard, and amazing layout and branding provided by Spunk Design Machine.

Our first project was a backyard barbecue to highlight the August Eat Local promotion.

For you photog-types out there, a note on the lighting. I was absolutely excited about the evening sun blaring in from behind, but using only natural light would either have blown out the background and washed out the vivid color on the table, or left everything not the sky way under-exposed. So I set my base exposure to where I wanted the background to be, then I set two speedlights back from the near corners of the table to provide fill. The sweet spot was an exposure that gave highlights from the strong backlighting, with just enough fill to give detail and max color on the table and on peoples’ faces. The two speedlights were set to identical power, providing an even field of light over the table and subjects, giving me the ability to change my angle and not have to worry about resetting the lights. Then I could concentrate on composition and directing the subjects.

My history with crafts is spotty at best. Elementary school art class is a memory mine field for me; mostly I recall coming home with eerily mushed clay bowls, woven paper placemats, and an inability to draw. But for the past six weeks I’ve been spending an hour each Thursday with a third grade boy. I’m a volunteer with a organization called Art Buddies, and we’ve been working on making my third grade friend a costume. Turns out, thirty years later, I don’t mind art class as much as I remember.

Art Buddies Spring 2009 – Images by Chris Bohnhoff

The basic Art Buddies structure is that people from the creative industry sign up and get paired with a third, fourth, or fifth grader at Whittier International Elementary in South Minneapolis. Over the course of six weeks you and your buddy have an assignment to work on – ours was putting together a costume depicting the child as ‘ruler of the world.’ But the emphasis is on hanging out and just being with your buddy, not so much on the end product (although there is a parade during the last meeting and a chance to show off a little bit).

I don’t have kids of my own, and my friends’ kids that I spend time with are generally in the 1-4 year old range, so this has really been my first one-on-one experience with a 9-year-old. And as week one started, and kids and adult buddies were getting paired up, I wasn’t sure how it was going to go. My buddy is a back of the line, messing around with the other back of the line boys kind of boy, so I had to wait through almost everyone before he made his way over to my table. And there was very little sign of interest as I introduced myself and our assignment, as the Art Buddies organizers guided us to do. We had been encouraged to bring some kind of tools or examples of the work we do in our creative careers, and I had brought my portfolio, and my tripod, and my camera. I asked if my buddy if he wanted to check those things out. Not really. But he was excited to check out the art supplies.

Art Buddies may kid its volunteers in to thinking that they are a big draw for these kids, but on that first Thursday afternoon I saw the truth: the real draw was free reign over a double-sized classroom chock full of bins and bins of art supplies. Fabric, yarn, all manor of little shiny things, hot glue guns, cardboard. . . the possibilities were staggering. And my buddy (with me trailing behind) spent most of that first hour digging through bins and coming back to our table with armfuls of stuff. He had no idea what his costume was going to be, and he didn’t especially want to talk about it, or about any of the other suggested topics, like what makes a good leader. But processing all the textures, colors, and possibilities was exactly what he wanted to do. So that’s what we did.

I learned a few things over the next five weeks with my buddy.

• Not all 9 year old boys are driven to make everything they touch in to some kind of weapon.
• Man, do the kids love them some hot glue guns.
• I can’t tell you the name of the movie or of the actor, but apparently I look like the bad guy killer in some movie that my buddy watched. . . all I can tell you is that it was in some apartment, and the character he said I looked like got mad and killed the landlord, then I killed my girlfriend, but I didn’t really love her, but then the girl that I really loved ended up killing me. Or something like that.
• I like 9 year olds. Even when all signs point to complete zoning out or messing around, they’re processing and figuring stuff out. It’s fun to watch that process and be amazed by what they can do.

As the weeks progressed, It did end up seeming like my  buddy liked hanging out with me. The evidence? We made each other cards after the parade on week six, and his said, “Thanks for being the best art buddy ever.”

Fun additional note: a reporter from the Star Tribune filed this story from our Art Buddies class – my buddy and I are even quoted (even though they spelled my name wrong)!

Exactly two years ago I traveled to rural Sierra Leone with a nonprofit group called the Sierra Leone Plymouth Partnership (SLPP). As a documentary and portrait photographer, my goal on the trip was to visually represent the group’s work providing relief to the residents of three small villages that, like most of Sierra Leone, had been almost entirely decimated by the country’s civil war in the 1990s. It was a life-changing trip, and one that I still feel fortunate to have made.

Each year a group of SLPP volunteers return to the villages to meet with residents and work together to improve their quality of life. This year’s trip is a little different: cell phone towers have gone up very close to the villages, making live blog posts possible. I’d encourage anyone to check out the SLPP blog, in particular this week while they’re in the villages, for an unfiltered sense of what it’s like to visit one of the poorest nations in the world: a complicated, but entirely enriching, experience for us members of the ‘first world.’

If you’re interested in seeing my take on Sierra Leone, please visit my Sierra Leone gallery. Also, I have a traveling exhibition of portraits from the trip entitled Made Real: Portraits from Sierra Leone that can be viewed and purchased online. All proceeds directly benefit the Sierra Leone Plymouth Partnership.

Last Sunday was one of a few types of Perfect Minnesota day: 70 degrees, sunny, leaves budding and daffodils out. (The other types: 50 degrees and peak fall colors, 20 degrees after a nice snowfall, pretty much any time on the patio at Sea Salt Restaurant.) Not only was it phenomenal outside, but a good friend of ours turned 70, and rented out the historic streetcar station at Como Park for a potluck. There was a roving accordion player, eleven apple pies (the birthday boy’s favorite), creamed herring, hotdishes, and just a great time. Plus one of those foam gliders.

Ahhhhhh Spring.

More at chrisbohnhoff.com, or follow me on Twitter.

I don’t have any kids of my own. My best friends have two young daughters who I see all the time, I’ve spent plenty of time around other peoples’ kids, and I consider myself a fan of the kid. And moreover, I feel like kids generally like me too, because I have absolutely no problem regressing mentally and emotionally to the level of a five year old. It’s pretty therapeutic, actually.

Having none of my own, however, puts me at a disadvantage from time to time.

I’ve started doing some work with the Plymouth Neighborhood Foundation, a great group that works on a number of fronts within the broad category of creating low income housing opportunities. Last week I visited two of the properties they manage to take a couple portraits, one of which was a family portrait: a Somali woman, her 18 month old son, and her 5 month old daughter.

Hawa and her kids

Rapport with my subject is absolutely the most important thing in my portrait work. If there’s no trust or element of connection between me and the people I’m shooting, the photos end up bland and uninspired, no matter how interesting the composition or how intricate the lighting. But also, that connection is why I’m a photographer. How many jobs are there where you can just enter the home of complete strangers and get a glimpse of their life? This kind of shoot is exactly why I love my job.

But back to rapport. When there are kids in a shoot, they are the wellspring of all rapport: if you get them on your side, the adults will be with you. If you lose them, the adults will be spending all their energy getting the kids in the game and none of their energy making some kind of connection with the camera. So we walk in to the apartment, and the son, Aris, has this look like, Who are you and why are you in my house? So I get to work. I make eye contact, get the smiles going. As I start opening my light cases and camera bag I make faces to him that say, Ooh, what’s this great stuff? You wanna look? And that’s when the control slips from my hands, about 48 seconds in to the shoot.

Turns out that Aris is at the exact age where everything he does is a search for the edges – is standing on the couch going to get him yelled at? How about pulling his sister’s hair? (Not that these things happened; they’re just examples.) If you’ve ever been around toddlers you know the button pushing I’m talking about. So as soon as I open my light case, I’ve way oversold how interested Aris needs to be about what’s going on; he’s very quickly all over everything, pulling out cords, trying to actually *jump* on my camera bag, wanting to open everything.

As I’m putting these very breakable and expensive electronic lights up on light stands around the room, I realize the scope of the tactical error I’ve made. Aris is totally sold on how fun this stuff is, and what would be really fun would be to yank it all down and see what happens when it hits the floor. So he’s toddling from light to light, making like he’s preparing to pull. Luckily, part of what he’s doing is testing Hawa, so as he does these things he looks over at her and at me as owner of these great toys, to gauge our reactions. We have time to lunge over and stop him before he does any damage.

Meanwhile, between lungings, I’m metering the light, composing the shot, trying to get a word with Hawa. It’s kind of lunacy, but the shot comes together and it’s time to get the family sitting on the couch together. So Hawa drags Aris away from the lights and onto the couch and I get a couple shots before Aris squirms away. I play goalie and protect the gear. Hawa re-apprehends Aris. We get a couple more shots.

And so on.

Luckily, Hawa’s daughter was just stoic. I can’t remember her name, which is fairly fitting: you always remember the troublemaker more than the good kid (spoken by a classic good first child). I was able to get 15 or so shots before our demands to stay on the couch transformed Aris’ fun into definitely not fun, rendering him pretty much unphotogenic for the purposes of a photo shoot meant to show happy apartment residents. We called it a wrap, and I have never packed gear so quickly.

More work at chrisbohnhoff.com.