I woke up before dawn to meet the inspirational Beth Klein at Gravelly Point park along the Potomac River. It’s not every day one gets to meet a person who lost the weight equivalent of a fifth grader through diet and exercise alone. Beth, my assistant for the day Kyle Gustafson (who is actually the web director over at Washingtonian Magazine) and I met in a parking lot at the crack of dawn and hit the bike trail for some scenic shots with what I hoped would be epic morning light. Yes, this blog is called The Golden Hour, but it’s rare that I actually wake up early enough to catch the first one of the day.
This was a two-part shoot with part one showing Beth being active and part two showing Beth cooking/eating grilled veggies. The original plan was to shoot her grilling on the bbq at her apartment building, but after seeing pictures of the grilling area, I had to nix it. Concrete and vertical bars. No thank you. We didn’t have a props budget, so I started asking around for a portable grill. My father had one sitting in the basement that he’d never even used. We put it together and I was sure the little gas tank was going to explode and send shards of shrapnel into my eyes. We got it working and I put the grill and gas tank into my trunk the night before the shoot. The next morning, I opened the door of my car to discover the tank had leaked and my car reeked of gas. I was afraid to turn on the car, certain that I had inadvertently created a car bomb that was really going to scuttle my morning. I opened all the doors and aired things out for a few minutes, but I didn’t have a lot of time to waste. I needed to get to the location before the sun did. Long story short, nothing exploded and the grill worked just fine when we set it up on a picnic table in the park.
Beth brought the veggies, but despite the fact that she’d purchased them fresh the previous evening, they were goopy and rotten. I was hoping for a lovely grilled veggie snack, but that wasn’t going to happen. I couldn’t in good conscience ask Beth to eat them, so we had to fake it. At least they looked good.