Soph's photo shoot at University of Utah

This past Thursday was Soph's photo shoot for Waterford Institute.  For those that don't know Waterford School is a private school here in Sandy, Utah.  It was a big project to promote their educational products on their website and entailed at least 5 days of shooting.  The photos below were taken with my iPhone, definitely not by the professional photographer.

Me: "Soph smile" Yep! This is what I get, a perfect forced smile.

In total there were 30 models/kids between the ages of 4 to 8 and several model/adults to represent the teachers. It was pretty interesting and fun, a little tiring until the right shot was finally achieved.

The photographer was hilarious, claiming that it was due to the fact he was functioning on 4 hours of sleep. However, one mother in particular did not appreciate his humor so much, as he made a negative comment about her daughter's choice of clothes.  Of course, assuming she received the same email like everyone else she would have known that the kids were not supposed to wear white, black or anything busy.  The mother later asked me "what does busy mean?" Oh, well, I guess that explains it.

Getting headphones adjusted and body positioned just so

Having to deal with so many kids, the photographer basically color coded all of them when giving out instructions. Soph was known as the "pink" girl.  Of course!!  And the "red" boy, oh boy! appeared to be suffering from Tourette's syndrome and ADHD shouting out "sh@t" and "they're gay!"

I can't imagine how they can coordinate all 5 kids in a classroom to do the same thing at the same time.  Well, it only happened for a split second. I believe the photographer was lucky enough to capture that shot with his fancy camera.  No kidding, this is snapshot of what it was like....  ["Red" boy needs to put his arms down. "Red" girl needs to stop looking as if she's reading the Wall Street Journal newspaper.  "Light blue" boy needs to stop squinting.  "Green" boy, perfect, don't move!  "Purple" girl needs to smile more and looks as if she's stuck in the moment.  "Pink" girl needs to lean forward more, etc.  Okay, "red" boy needs to turn around.  Everybody needs to place their hands on the keyboard. "Pink" girl needs to pretend she's writing/calculating...] and on and on for 3 hrs.  I was exhausted just listening to it all!

Sophie with her pretend teacher

One of the things Sophie was supposed to do was accept an award from her teacher with a big grin and with lots of excitement on her face.  Did that happen?  If you know Soph, you probably already know the outcome.  The photographer said, "NEXT, go get the "green" boy.....Thank goodness, there was one boy, yes the "green" boy (aka Vance), that took his cues spot-on.  I believe it also helped that he was the oldest in the bunch.

Pretending to be working on the computer

Another cute little girl began crying because she was shivering from being cold and just broke out in tears....So she was out of the picture, literally and figuratively, for awhile.

I actually have to give a lot of credit to the photographer and the crew.  They did an amazing job with all the kids.  I think working with babies, kids, and animals are probably the most challenging.

Once the pictures have been selected to go online on Waterford's website, I will leave a comment herein with the link.

Soph's pretend teacher and photographer

So the lesson I learned about this particular photo shoot....things like tears, unruly behavior, no smiles, people in the way, can be resolved by blurring things out.  I asked Soph if she enjoyed modeling; she said "it was very boring" but still liked it anyway because she made some money, which by the way is going into her savings account for college.