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.