Did you spot us last weekend in our green jackets around Calgary? Our intrepid group of volunteer photographers were out in force this year at the The Sports Chek Mother’s Day Run/Walk.

This was our second opportunity to volunteer our services to the run/walk and we love every second of it. It’s hard to feel cold with so many smiling faces running up to you! The Sport Check Mother’s Day Run/Walk has an amazing group of volunteers that have been putting on this event for 34 years. The only thing they had not been able to do before was capture the spirit of the run/walk through images. Last year we gave them 500 images all professionally cleaned up and easy to find. Prior to us coming on board they only had a handful of images that they reused year after year for sponsorship, recruiting and media.

This year, in addition to the handpicked images that we delivered to the charity, we also uploaded the images to our Inner Spirit Photography website.  This way everyone can download their favourite image for free.

Since we started Inner Spirit we have been passionate about giving back to the community that gives so much to us. Usually we do this with donations for charity auctions, but with this we are excited that we can get directly involved and use our skills to help support such an important cause. We do so many maternity sessions and know that some of those moms use the Neonatal Intensive Care Units at the Peter Lougheed, Rockyview or Foothills Hospitals service. I have no doubt that there are children alive today because of the equipment obtained from the donations raised by this run.

This event is very important to me, and watching the mothers walking with their kids and grandkids brings back memories of walking it with my mom, Nola Laurie, years ago.

We cannot support the race without our volunteers, who were probably hoping for a morning of sunshine but came out regardless.

My volunteer team is:

Rob Berrade
Mason Dodds
Drew Gregory
Matt Lachmouth
Jan Howells-Laurie
Philip Litke
Carol Markusse
Neil Speers
Brandie Sunley
Cendrine Tolomio
Julie Vincent
Fran Williams
Louie Zhang

If you are a professional photographer, I urge you to look for similar opportunities in your community to share your skills and give back. It’s great fun, great promotion, and great for the community, but more than anything else, it’s great for expanding the heart and spirit, and isn’t that what photography should be all about?

We know the Christmas season has begun when we start preparing our charity donations. With this weekend we just finished up a couple, most notably the JDRF fundraiser, and we are putting together the two diverse pieces tonight.

Willow Park has their 17th Charity Wine Auction on November 6th – a huge gala affair sponsoring the Vintage Fund, an endowment fund for the future. Each year the fund distributes the interest earned to various charitable causes in Alberta. The Calgary Foundation is Calgary’s community Foundation that administers close to 400 endowment funds and bequests.

It’s exciting to be part of this, as the fund has raised over $2,000,000. This year the charities are The Calgary Poppy Fund & Veteran’s Food Bank, The Calgary Homeless Foundation, and SAIT Polytechnic.

In the spirit of the event, there is a $10,000 prize for the best dressed in roaring ’20s attire, donated of course to the charity of their choice. Talk about win/win approachs!

We are donating a session and wall print combination valued at over $2,000. Come and bid on it.

On the other end of the scale is the 2nd annual Ladies Shopping Gala at the Blackie School. This is a fundraiser for the Blackie School. We will be donating a session, along with some special offers.

If you have a charity or a non profit event that could use our help, please contact us. We would be delighted to help out.

I attended last year’s Social Media Success Summit 2009. Amazing amount of insights. The Facebook Summit promises the same.

It’s all online, with access to recordings for a year, transcripts, connections and more. They have been working on the build-up for over 6 months. They have brought in people who have made the media work for them.

They will be talking about tactics, expectations, marketing, approaches and revealing tools you can use.

It runs for the week, with the opening presentations starting this evening. We will see how much I can absorb and apply.

No doubt about it, Dave Cross knows his stuff and has fun with it. As usual, nearly every chair had a bum in it, paying rapt attention to the 20 foot screens. Dave has this great ability to move it along but seem like he is unhurried. The seminar was presented by Kelbytraining.com. The company really knows how to get you into the flow of things; from supporting vendors with great special offers, to a perfect sound system to catch all of Dave’s tips.

One of the more enjoyable perks of the seminar is the workshop booklet, with lots of places for personal notes. The manual, Dave explained, covers every step, every photo he talked about. The package also came with a disc of the original images he used for teaching so the students could experiment with them later.

All ages were in attendance; behind me was a 12 year old boy complete with iPad and Macbook Pro. Further back were some old guys muttering with happy grins.

Lots to grin about. Dave showed some of the magic that is in Photoshop 5. I heard lots of “Well, I like that!” There are some huge leaps forward in this version.

Dave has a book out on Selections. He suggested that he could abridge it and just use the new Photoshop 5 selection tool. His demo of that defined his recommendation, even wispy hairs got snagged.

Being the selection expert, he showed a layers trick to select a tree full of delicate leaves from a background of cloudy blue sky.

Naturally he showed off some of the new flashy tools in Photoshop 5. (I am a reviewer for Adobe Photoshop; I will have a full review article out soon.) Pretty much all he taught was applicable to the other CS versions.

A lot of his instruction was on workflow speedups, all very effective.

These seminars come to Calgary once or twice a year and are very affordable. The next time you hear of it, if you have any interest in Photoshop at all, book a seat.

This is the video of our still images from the Sport Chek Mother’s Day Run & Walk. I had an amazing team of photographers, one at each key location taking photographs. This video is created using something from everyone’s images.

Fran and I sorted through 6,500 images to distill them down to the 515 images that will be used to promote and tell the Mother’s Day Run story. Please go here to see some of them, posted on our Facebook page.

It is truly an amazing experience. We were the Official Photographer of the run and a major sponsor as well. The weather went from rain, to sleet, to a bit of snow, then finished with sunshine. They ended the event with little legs run at the Plaza. We had two portrait tents setup, and all the monies paid went into the Charity.

You may have seen us, we had special jackets and volunteer shirts made up for the run – green with a big PHOTOGRAPHER across the back.

The event had just over 15,000 participants going the distance, all ages, all speeds.

It was a great event that we were thrilled to be part of.