When Life Gives You Lemonade

Every now and again us photographers get opportunities to make photographs that can transcend the reason we are there in the first place. This happened to me this weekend while photographing a birthday party at Ultrazone in Sherman Oaks.

I can’t recall how it happened, but four years ago I got asked if I shoot kids birthday parties. I am not one to turn down cash so I said yes. Since then I have been documenting every one of this girl’s birthdays. At this point it feels like a family reunion every time I show up, and their family brings me a ton of joy.

When I heard she was having a laser tag themed birthday I was pretty stoked. I’ve never actually played before, but Barney from “How I Met Your Mother” made it look amazing (especially in a suit). I showed up to to the venue I did the usual of making some portraits of the family while they set up for the party and waited for their guests to arrive. It ended up being about thirty -forty kids who showed up, this allowed for three teams in the laser tag arena. Now I’m a bit night blind so it took me a second to get used to the course. Once I locked in my distance to range focus on the players it was on. The first round I played it pretty safe and just used the flash to catch the kids like a deer in headlights. After the round we all had pizza and I was struck with inspiration. I realized that I was actually in a pretty good position to create some photographs that could be used outside of a family album. By the next round my brain was turning and I thought this is a perfect time to do a test shoot. I had a full room of kids running around in costumes having fun. So I started playing around trying to capture the energy of laser tag. The images below are some of my favorites and I think could be a good proof of concept for future shoots like this.

The point of all this is that we have to be aware of the opportunities we get. Some jobs or assignments we get are just what they are, but some times life gives you lemonade. We just gotta take a sip.