I had been up since 5am the day before, so, I was good and ready for absolutely nothing. We headed off to the guesthouse, struggled with 220V power outlets and stumbled about in the dim light getting our mosquito nets in place, before crash landing on cots disguised as beds.
On Sunday morning, we were greeted with a hot breakfast and for some of us, cold showers. We gathered up anything valuable, piled into a small Toyota van and headed over to the orphanage. Thirty of the fifty-two kids would be heading off to church and we followed along. The plan for the remainder of the day was to begin photographing the kids. That is until jet lag began to alter some of my plans.
Still, nothing I’ve done compares to the feeling I got when dozens of kid ran over to great me. Some yelled out my name, others just grabbed my hand and walked along with me. It was my great fortune to return to Rehema Home and the kids made me feel welcomed.
The roads in Nairobi could easily bring a Jeep to its knees. Every road we traveled was punctuated with the smell of diesel or the smoke from burning garbage. Although I had slept, my internal clock was way off the mark and I found myself drifting off. It was only 11am and I felt wasted.
On the way back to the orphanage, I pulled out my video camera to get some basic background footage of Nairobi. I felt it important to illustrate the desperation that surrounds the Rehema Home in order to properly contrast the benefits to the children that live within the walls of the orphanage.
I had recently replaced my Sony Z1U camera with a new NX5U camera, mainly because I had dropped it and did not want to spend serious money on repairing old technology.
Both cameras had many similarities, but the big difference in my mind was that the NX5U doesn’t use tape. It records beautiful 1920x1080 HD onto two easily obtainable SDHC cards or one very small and powerful 128 gig flash drive that mounts neatly on the side of the camera. Roughly the size of an audiocassette, the drive is capable of recording close to 11 hours of high quality HD footage and it’s powered directly from the camera. No tapes, no extra wires and no additional batteries.
We’ve been using the Sony EX1 and EX3 as our principal cameras, so we’re used to, and prefer file-based cameras.
There are some areas of Nairobi that it would simply be unwise to stop your car and whip out your camera, yet I still wanted to capture much of what we were seeing. From past experience I knew that shooting out the side window would basically blur anything that was close to the camera, but I had read a post on DVinfo.com that touted a unique, slow motion feature built into the NX5, so I decided to give it a whirl.
Twelve seconds later I was stunned when the camera’s monitor began to playback ultra-slow, images of the people we had just passed. Very cool! It took me awhile to get over this. The downside of the effect is that once you have shot your twelve seconds, you have to wait for it to render out, but there was also a six and three second setting with shorter render times, with the three second setting resulting in the best quality.
I spent the rest of the day photographing the kids. To keep it simple, I had brought only two lenses to Kenya, a 28-105mm Tamron lens and a 70-300mm Nikon lens. My intention was to directly engage the kids in these photographs, so I used the Tamron for most of the shots, allowing me to remain close to my subject, but not so wide that I would distort their faces.
These are the lucky kids, the ones that have been spared the terrible conditions outside of Rehema Home's walls. Some of the children had been abandoned, others abused. Nearly half of them are HIV positive, but you'd never know it. Seeing them lined up in their Sunday clothes or their school uniforms you would hardly suspect that their lives were any different from children raised in a middle class town in Long Island. But, the evidence is there, we had just driven through it and keeping fifty-two kids healthy, fed, clothed and safe is a never ending task.
It's only though the love and kindness of others that these kids have been given a chance to survive.
The orphanage receives all of its funding from private donations and it's a constant challenge to keep the money flowing. It's a daunting task to constantly ask for money in light of today's economy, especially with a new crisis developing somewhere in the world nearly every day. Rehema Home has a small, very dedicated marketing team back in the states that is constantly working on their behalf. The images I'm capturing will hopefully be effective in raising both funds and awareness of their Sponsor a Child website and other fundraising programs.
Seeing the children's faces in my viewfinder is pure joy. The kids insist on seeing their images displayed on the cameras LCD screen and they giggle almost every time. Fifty-two incredible kids and five hours later, I had already shot over 900 images. Thank God for digital!
These are the lucky kids, the ones that have been spared the terrible conditions outside of Rehema Home's walls. Some of the children had been abandoned, others abused. Nearly half of them are HIV positive, but you'd never know it. Seeing them lined up in their Sunday clothes or their school uniforms you would hardly suspect that their lives were any different from children raised in a middle class town in Long Island. But, the evidence is there, we had just driven through it and keeping fifty-two kids healthy, fed, clothed and safe is a never ending task.
It's only though the love and kindness of others that these kids have been given a chance to survive.
The orphanage receives all of its funding from private donations and it's a constant challenge to keep the money flowing. It's a daunting task to constantly ask for money in light of today's economy, especially with a new crisis developing somewhere in the world nearly every day. Rehema Home has a small, very dedicated marketing team back in the states that is constantly working on their behalf. The images I'm capturing will hopefully be effective in raising both funds and awareness of their Sponsor a Child website and other fundraising programs.
Seeing the children's faces in my viewfinder is pure joy. The kids insist on seeing their images displayed on the cameras LCD screen and they giggle almost every time. Fifty-two incredible kids and five hours later, I had already shot over 900 images. Thank God for digital!
By now, the jet lag and warm sun had begun to blur my vision and the day ended at a nearby Ethiopian restaurant were we ate and discussed the week's schedule. It was ironic that we could get so much for so little money.
A few hours later, we scrambled into our mosquito nets and lunged into sleep.
www.rehemahome.com
www.duckyou.com
www.rehemahome.com
www.duckyou.com
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