Hotel Portrait Project - Orlando Portrait Photographer

If you also follow along our journey on Flickr or on my personal website, then you know I have been shooting photos for the Project 365 challenge this year. The point of this challenge is to force yourself to improve your photography because you have to shoot a new picture every single day. As sort of a subset of this, I started a mini project back in Orlando to take portraits of the hotel staff at my alma mater, the Orlando World Center Marriott.

Ever since Betty got accepted into her PhD program at Georgia State University, we knew we were going to be leaving Orlando and moving to Atlanta. As my time grew shorter to the inevitable move, I started asking the staff at the hotel to quickly pose for me as part of my daily Project 365 photo. What resulted from this was a mini “Hotel Portrait Project” to grab portraits of the wonderful staff at the World Center. It is hard to look at these photos now because they are doing exactly what I hoped, reminding me of my dear friends back in Orlando.

The people I will miss most of all are the fun-loving Front Desk staff, like my awesome Supervisors Mike and Sarah pictured above. I begged them to please indulge me for a bit and we headed up to the roof of the hotel (28 stories high!) for a photoshoot one night. Don’t tell anyone else we were up there!

I can’t forget about the Asian Invasion! We are very multinational at the Front Desk, Fion is from Hong Kong. Tomomi is from Japan, and Meng is from China. I don’t know how but I think Sumalee (Thailand) escaped every time I tried to take her photo!

Ok, I guess enough with the Asian Invasion crew: Thing 1, Thing 2, Thing 3, and Thing 4. How about a serious portrait of the man responsible for all of this pain and suffering? John Snowden had the foresight to actually hire me way back in 2004 as a 3rd Shift overnight Bellman. I can even remember my interview with him – at least parts of it, is that weird? John was very influential in my Marriott career and was a real mentor that first year and a half as a bellman while I was in school. Throughout the years I have drifted back to the World Center and John has still been here. It was a little awkward during my last tenure as Assistant Front Office Manager because now I was technically over John in the hierarchy. I have nothing but the utmost respect for John and can’t wait to visit him again the next time I am in Orlando.

Their is something timeless about Black & Whites, especially for portraits. When I was trying to take a unique portrait of James (below) the Black & White just worked the best here as well. Guys never seem to know how to pose at least compared to girls, so James of course gave me a classic goofy look. Nothing wrong with that! Great portrait of him in my opinion at least!

With so many great photos it is very hard to pick a few favorites, because to me they are all favorites! The associates all mean so much to me that it is hard to narrow the selection down to a few for this blog post. This was a favorite though of Joana, one of the other Front Office Supervisors:

We had all of these hats from an Interstate Batteries convention that was held at the hotel and for some reason I asked Joana to put one on so I could take her photo, ah life at the World Center… Their really are too many photos to show, like this one of Yady:

Watch the full set on Flickr below. I still miss you guys – my extended family at the World Center! I’ve been making some great new connections up here in Atlanta but the World Center will always have a special place in my heart.