Great meeting tonight everyone! I'm going to try to recap what we decided. Please feel to fill in what I missed and contribute your thoughts.

Robert Leonard, from the Cabarrus Baptist Association, had the sign up sheets for the toys drive. They are still accepting new sign-ups but so far there are 54 families scheduled to come in for toys on 12/12. He expects that we will get 50-75 families for portraits. We're going to start notifying families immediately of the portrait opportunity. Families already scheduled to pick up toys on 12/12 will have their portraits made following their appointment for toy pickup. The other families will be staggered throughout the day based on their last name.

The families will flow through the process like this...

1) They go to the Sharing House to pick up the toys. The Baptist Association will provide childcare in one of the classrooms in the adjacent church building. Choosing toys takes 10-15 minutes. They can stash the toys in their car before moving to the portrait area.

2) Families will sign-in for their portraits in the sanctuary adjacent to the Sharing House. Mothers and older daughters will then move into a room designated for Hair and Makeup.

3) Next, they pick up the little ones from the childcare area and the family will have their portraits made. There will be three studio setups in the sanctuary each with two photographers. The photographer will pose the family and shoot a few frames until they think they've got a nice portrait. The family is then released to wait on their print or go home and return later (depending on the backlog at the printer and/or weather).

4) The photographer will carry his memory card to the computer area (located in the “stage” area at the front of the sanctuary). There should be three workstations. Brian Bedrick is providing a router to allow us to share the printer among the workstations. The photographer and the retoucher will choose the image for the family's print. The retoucher will spend about 5 minutes cleaning up the image and then send it to the printer.

5) Finally, volunteers will take the prints and put them in frames (Brian Bedrick has arranged for a donation of 75 frame/mat sets from PictureFrames.com). These will be delivered to the family if they chose to wait or held for later pickup. The Baptist Association has offered to pay the postage to ship prints that aren't picked up that day.

Issues
Printing: Mark Santo is providing an Epson R1800. He will purchase two sets of ink and return the backup set if we don't use it. Ink and paper is being provided by Bigg's Camera at cost. We're dividing the cost among ourselves. We decided on $20 each to keep it simple. Mark will be posting his address so you can send him a check. Your contribution is tax deductible and the Sharing House will provide you with a receipt for your records. If there is more money collected than needed it will go towards our lunch that day. Jim Lozier is providing a second Epson printer to be on site as a backup.

Power: We don't believe there is enough power in the sanctuary for all the lights and computers. The Baptist Association will add a new breaker box before the 12th.

Manpower: Sharon Aleman will be recruiting volunteers from her Church youth group to fill in on check-in, crowd control and framing. The Baptist Association will provide a spanish-speaking volunteer to assist with translation when we need it. We had 8 people at the meeting tonight. If you couldn't make it I need your firm commitment as soon as possible (please contact me directly with your name, email address, phone number and a description of equipment/expertise you can provide).

Weather: We don't have an indoor place to hold people between the time their photo is made and when their print is ready. In the event of bad weather we will ask them to return later for their print or offer to ship it. I'm not sure that shipping framed prints will be an option. They will probably have to pick those up if they want them.

Additional prints: I don't think we decided exactly what we were going to do about that. One idea was to send them with the final image on CD and a release so that they could have additional prints made. This adds a step in the computer area since I assume it will have to be the retoucher burning those CDs at the same time they are sending the image to the printer.

Attire: I'll put together some kind of name badge with the Help-Portrait logo for all the volunteers. Otherwise, just dress professionally. We want this to be a special experience for these families. You can purchase shirts from the Help-Portrait site if you like. That's completely optional.

Preparation: We're going to use Friday evening (12/11) to do some setting up and test printing. I will be there early Saturday morning so you can start your prep on that day as early as you like. We need all hands on deck by 8am. We could be seeing our first session of the morning very close to 9am.

Volume: Jim Lozier ran the numbers and concluded that we could run 80 families through our stations if everything goes well. Worst case, we would run something more like 60. It puts us right around where we need to be. Obviously, more people in the mix will help insure that can move the maximum number of people through.

Hair and Makeup: Sharon Aleman is going to work on getting some of those supplies donated. MUAs and Stylists please confirm your participation with me then I'll give you her contact info so that you can coordinate your efforts.

All those lights in one room: Peter Farrar has gotten Bigg's Camera to agree to loan us 3 sets of Pocket Wizards. This should help moderate the issue of one person's lights setting off everyone else's,

Workstations: I can provide a Window XP Desktop system and a Vista laptop with Photoshop and Lightroom installed on each. Neither of these are very fast systems. Peter Farrar is working on getting us a calibration system for the monitors. At a minimum we need one more. Three faster desktop workstation would be ideal.

I think that's just about everything. Jump in! What are we missing? What can you provide?