Medical Concentration

This past week was pretty amazing even though I found myself in a medical facility 3 times over it's course. The good news is that only one of those occurrences was actually an emergency health-related issue but even that one occurrence turned out to have a happy ending and some good came of it.

It started off with an opportunity to join a neighbor of mine in taking some photographs of a local spine specialist. We were having a small neighborhood get-together, started talking and things just fell into place. He was doing some video work for their promotions and website and needed some updated stills, I was free. Perfect!

 

Medical portraiture was something I didn't have in my portfolio even though I'm pretty familiar with the setting thanks to my own little tussle with cancer. We wound up heading to the facility Wednesday and everything went really well. Being able to photograph some mock consults, procedures, and portraits was a lot of fun especially given that our handler was having a blast walking around in a hospital gown as our model patient. We covered the entry way, consult rooms, the physical therapy area, a procedure room and waiting areas, all of which were very nice.  Of course there are challenges as well in making sure we didn't get actual patients or patient information in a shot to preserve their privacy but overall it was just a great experience with some results everyone is very happy with.

Later that afternoon when back at home I got a call from my wife that a family member had been rushed to the hospital and so I hurried to meet her there. It had sounded very dire at first but thankfully turned out to be less critical than initially thought. As we rotated ourselves and some other family members in to visit, I  found myself witnessing an amazing sunset and cloud patterns as well as a very cute new nephew.  Naturally I had my camera with me and photos ensued. At one point I was sent to grab some food for my lovely lady and unfortunately it was also right at the golden hour so a 20-30 minute round trip turned into more of a 30-60 minute endeavor. I'm a sucker for sunsets...

And that was just one day this week.

The next day I got to play both chauffeur and paparazzi to my good friend Roger who was going in for some physical therapy. He was looking for some photos of his experience and I was of course happy to oblige. As he went from task to task I tried to capture the both an overall frame and the focus of the exercise. It struck me how so much of our indoor lighting is actually so much more dim than we think it is. This speaks to the incredible optics we have in our eyes and figuring out how to pull that same sort of clear data with a photographic equipment takes a little work! Of course Roger was working harder than me as his personal torturer therapist gave him task after task to complete. It was cool that part of it involved the Nintendo Wii Fit Balance Board and concluded with some good old fashioned electro-shock therapy! It is worth noting that the electro-shock was in no way related to the Wii...

So there you have it, 3 medical events all with their own unique photographic opportunities. Of course that's not all that happened this past week but I'm saving that for my next blog post which will be coming shortly!