Family Portraits started with a familiar missional goal: identify what holes exist for our local community in availability, access, and impact, and find a way to provide meaningful service in that space. What began as a utilitarian opportunity to leverage existing Library resources in meeting a community need has blossomed into the Library's most expansive recurring annual program, serving nearly 500 families since its inception in 2021. Starting in 2021, each fall a staff member transforms the underutilized Library Conference Room, crafting multiple festive, nonsectarian backdrops comprised entirely from materials on hand from Library storage or on loan from staff. In patrons' twenty-minute appointment slots, a Library staff member stages the family/individual and shoots photos in various combinations of backgrounds, poses, and props (as determined by the patrons prior). Afterward, the staff member uses free, open-source software to edit the best shots in the same vein a professional photographer would, delivering around a dozen card-ready edits along with any usable unedited photos to the patron digitally via cloud storage. While time-intensive for the staff member responsible for the set-up, staging, shooting, and editing, the program operates on an almost non-existent budget and is easily replicable year-over-year at libraries of any size. As the program entered its fourth year in 2024, word-of-mouth exposure increased significantly, particularly after the program was recognized at a state level by the NC Public Library Directors Association. Following the most ambitious year of the program from a patron availability standpoint (2023), and adding in that the programming staff member responsible for staging, shooting, editing, and delivering the photos would be leaving in the middle of the program's normal editing season for paternity leave, significant innovation proved necessary to slash down staff time investment if the program was to remain available to serve the community. The first step in streamlining was to completely overhaul the patron registration process. Staff enacted a new-look online registration in 2024 as a prerequisite to book an appointment. Under the new system, a custom link (available as QR codes throughout the building and hyperlinked on Library web/social media pages), directed patrons to a one-stop web experience where they could: maximize photoshoot time by filling out all their information; access the full rules, guidelines, and suggestions for enjoying the program; utilize a full catalog-style collection of family portraits from previous years, as well as photos of the backdrop options, to custom order the poses and placements they wanted for their shoot; and, especially important given the staffing circumstances of the program, select whether they preferred to ensure photo delivery by November first (whether edited or not), or wait for the full set of edited photos after the holidays. Another key change instituted in 2024 proved pivotal in slashing editing time, and thus enhancing the capacity of the program: the addition of photography lights. Investing in a set of low-end studio-style photography lights (approximately $50) allowed the staff photographer to better control the shooting environment prior to taking the photos, which cut the largest parts of the photo editing (lighting and color adjustments) out, taking the average edit time down from around ten minutes to less than three. A third key innovation-the addition of a color-neutral background option-while seemingly a flippant addition, provided an unexpected increase in access.
