Basic Requirements:
- You are a professional photographer, earning at least a portion of your income through your business.
- You have a dedicated website or online portfolio that shows experience in family and portrait photography. (Ideally with your own domain.)
- You must have access to professional equipment, including editing software.
- You cannot have been convicted of a felony.
Responsibilities:
- If you receive contact from an MHPN rep, please respond with your availability as immediately as possible, as we may be trying to place an urgent request.
- Once you are matched with a recipient, please contact them within 1-2 business days, by phone and email, to make arrangements for the time and location of your shoot. Please use the utmost respect, compassion and sensitivity to the requests and conditions of the applicant and their family. Some may be completely “normal” sessions mobility-wise, and some may be within a home with an immobile applicant. If patient is currently in treatment, please be especially patient and flexible if things don’t go as expected.
- If a recipient has to cancel their session due to health concerns (which is common for those currently in unpredictable treatment), you may handle it in one of two ways: 1) if you choose to “adopt” this family and have some amount of flexibility, you may remain available to them as soon as they are able to find a date that works, knowing that at any time you may send them back to us if it takes too long to find a date that works. 2) you are not required to take a second date. Simply let them know that this was the only day that would fit in your schedule and communicate the situation to us as soon as possible so that we might try to re-match them.
- Use your style, but photos are to be natural, focused on people and relationships (rather than props or clever posing), and processed in a natural, professional way with minimal color effects or vignetting.
- Photographer must upload fully processed images, free of watermarks, to the MHF Smug Mug account within 4-6 weeks. Please consider delivering a handful of images sooner in cases of higher urgency. Photographer agrees to release rights to these images to MHF. This policy is solely to ensure to our applicants that their privacies will be respected as requested. MHF will not sell or profit from your images unless specific permission is given by you. If an opportunity ever comes available where selling an image helps further the awareness of the mission, we will send 100% of the proceeds of that image to the photographer who took the image.
- The applicant should receive a recommended amount of 20-40 images for a single subject or couples or 40-60 images for a family, to allow for as many combinations and expressions as necessary to capture the applicant and their loved ones. Use your judgement for quantity, keeping in mind that your session may be one of the last ones a recipient may have.
- Photographer may only blog their session by permission, and if blogged, may only use the applicant’s first name if given specific permission from Magic Hour Foundation. We will advise you on whether your applicant has given permission. Please do not request permission from the applicant.
Once you apply:
We would ideally like to put every volunteer photographer to work, but the reality is that every photographer has a different level of skill and expertise. We in no way intend to be picky in our acceptance, but since this will be some of our recipients’ one and only shot to get their photos taken, we need to do our best to ensure that the photographers we send out will be capable and experienced with portrait photography in a variety of settings. To check this we have a very light control process that each volunteer must pass to be an official member of Magic Hour’s Photographer Network.
Your information will be reviewed by our Control Team and you will be notified by email of your acceptance. Each photographer’s online portfolio will be assessed in seven areas (Professionalism of Website, Use of Light, Focus, Natural Posing, Natural Post-Processing, Use of Blog or Active Online Presence, Use of Social Media and Client Interaction). If you are not approved and your business is new, it may simply be due to the need for a larger portfolio. You may re-apply and we ask that photographers not take our acceptance as evidence of their quality as a professional. This level of control is simply to do our best to protect our recipients, who may only have one shot at their photo session and need the services of an experienced, professional photographer.
