The Lightroom Team Volunteers with Gilda’s Club Twin Cities

One of the reasons I love working for Adobe is that it’s a company with a heart. On a daily basis, I work to perfect a program that helps photographers all over the world create their own brand of magic, but once in awhile we get to help those in need directly through the power of imagery.

It was in this spirit that the Lightroom team recently embarked on our own philanthropic adventure. We heard about the Grand Opening of the Minneapolis chapter of Gilda’s Club, a non-profit organization helping those dealing with the effects of cancer, and instantly knew we wanted to get involved. After brainstorming, we decided to volunteer our photography knowledge and expertise to create memorable photographs for cancer patients and their families. Collaborating with Gilda’s club, we came up with two photo setups:

• A photo booth equipped with props to celebrate the festive nature of the Grand Opening party
• A photo studio setup with backdrops and lights for formal family portraits

For the photo booth, we built a tethered capture station that fed photos directly into Lightroom. We applied a black & white develop preset to images from the photo booth, simulating traditional photo booth snapshots. These were displayed 4-up in Survey mode on a nearby monitor for everybody at the party to see and enjoy. After the event, the photo booth images were shared on the GCTC Facebook page.

For the photo studio, 2 tethered capture stations were set up, and we alternated between stations for each session. Images were fed into Lightroom and members from the Lightroom and Premiere Pro teams prepped the images, applied color corrections, and exported to individual thumb drives for the families. We shot 21 different groups in 4 hours!

We had such an amazing time with everybody and are so thankful for the stories that they shared with us. We shot a couple celebrating their 34th anniversary, a 4-generation quartet of beautiful women, and one family of 14, where both Grandma and one grandson are cancer survivors.

Both the photobooth and the studio setup were huge hits, reminding us that photography is a special way to capture moments in time. The team at Gilda’s Club Twin Cities is already asking about ‘next time’ and we can’t wait to do it all over again.

We’d love to hear other stories of you using Lightroom and photography to help the local community…post a comment telling your story!

About Gilda’s Club

Gilda’s Club, founded by Gene Wilder and Joanna Bull in honor of Gilda Radner, is an organization that provides support and resources to people dealing with cancer. Membership is free, and Gilda’s Club supports anybody affected with cancer, including cancer patients and survivors and their friends and family. It’s a great organization that lives up to its mission; “No one should face cancer alone”.