In 2008, the Kollel’s PR started emphasizing its role as a community builder. To illustrate that point, I was asked to create a group photo which would include the staff, all the alumni who had stayed in Cincinnati, and their families. One Sunday, almost everyone gathered for a photo shoot in the dining room of Cincinnati Hebrew Day School, which we had festooned with blue plastic table covers. Dr. Nachum Klafter took the actual photo. A few days later, I photographed the handful of people who hadn’t been able to make the weekend shoot. I put everyone together in Photoshop, and superimposed the group on a photograph of Old Westbury Gardens – the only photo I could find which matched the scale and perspective of the group photo!

Kollel staff and local alumni, with families – September, 2008

photo shoot, September 2008

Printed on photo paper and framed, the result looked a lot better than it would seem if you had only viewed the photo on a computer monitor. On screen, you can definitely tell which people were added later, and artifacts remain from the “blue screen.” In hindsight, we should have made sure the group shoot was lit up better. We were also running up against the limitations of digital camera resolutions at that time.

the ‘studio” in 2010

the magazine cover

Two years later, I was asked to orchestrate another group photo, this time for a magazine cover. We did the shoot in a nearby, vacant house, where we could set up our tripod, the “blue screen,” and the lighting, and leave them, undisturbed, for the week or so it would take for everyone to file through and have their pictures taken. This helped to make sure that the lighting and perspective would be consistent across all of the photos. All together, there were 65 photographs! Because they were all shot from the same perspective, they didn’t look right when arranged horizontally (as I’d done in 2008). I ended up stacking everyone on top of each other, and I chose a stock photo for the background which would make it seem as though the photo had been taken from a distance – which would jive with the perspectives of the individual shots.

Kollel staff and local alumni, November 2010

the photographer in his studio, 2016

In 2016, after the Kollel expanded its staff, we did a third group photo, which we used as the centerfold of that year’s annual report. This time we set up shop in the Kollel’s Annex Library. Again I took lots of smaller photos and combined them, but this time we only took pictures of staff members and their families, so there were only 32 photos to work with. Instead of looking for an appropriate photo to use as the “setting,” I incorporated the group photo into the backdrop of the annual report – a photoshopped picture of the vintage Formica in my mother’s bathroom! The photograph below is the result, as it appeared in the centerfold.

Kollel staff and families (most of them, anyway), November 2016