Our Very Last Book Project Shoot - Fountains Abbey

I've been so looking forward to sharing these pictures from Fountains Abbey. We had a really nice time shooting them with Amy and her family. It was a glorious hot day and as it was half term we took our new grand daughter - who was only 10 weeks old along with her mum and Uncle/my son together with a picnic. We sent Andy on ahead of us to meet up with Amy as it was so hot and we followed to arrive roughly at the time we expected him to have finished with Amy.









It was a great afternoon except for the fact that we had another shoot booked in after Amys (Amy was booked at 1pm with the second shoot being booked at 3pm). Unfortunately the second shoot family didn't turn up. So we walked around the grounds of the Abbey looking for them for an hour in the seering heat, thinking we had missed them and then went to get everyone ice creams to cool off before finally giving it up as a bad job at 4.30pm.

All of the money donated in lieu of the shoots has gone directly to Candlelighters. When the book is printed we will have paid for all the design work, layout and production costs of the book - so the more pages that have been purchased the more money this has cost us to do.

When people don't show or cancel a shoot at the eleventh hour it is not only Candlelighters that lose out on the lost donation but in real terms it actually costs us quite a lot. Our time to us is money. The chances are that another family would have wanted that appointment slot - we are very busy with appointments and half term weeks are always premium booking times. We have things to do all the time and sometimes work silly hours just to keep on top of the workload so to give the time freely and then have something like this happen is a double whammy.

We have learnt one or two hard lessons along the way with this project and although it's with regret we will not be running any similar projects in the forseeable future. Charity, as they say, really does begin at home.