Family Session: Giveaway

August is over and I can’t even believe it. The month of August is a very spe­cial month for the Prokopets fam­ily. It is marked with tragedy and yet filled with bless­ings. As you all know from my post yes­ter­day, the month ends with the cel­e­bra­tion of Vitaliy’s birth. But let me share with you how our August begins.

August 3 is the anniver­sary of Vitaliy’s father, mother, and lit­tle brother pass­ing away in a car acci­dent. I can remem­ber the phone call as if it just hap­pened yes­ter­day. The pain that fol­lowed was a kind of pain that I never knew existed. My eyes and my heart were opened up to a whole new part of life that many of you have expe­ri­enced and felt your­selves. Death is a part of life; it’s the part that we like to hide under our beds or in the back of our clos­ets. We want it to be out of sight and out of mind. But it became a real­ity for us and it has made its mark on our lives. It surely made its mark. Even tried to knock us com­pletely down. But oh no! Our Lord wouldn’t allow it. He held on to us tight and car­ried us through.

One year and 2 days later, Vitaliy and I mar­ried. Many peo­ple told us not to get mar­ried so close to the anniver­sary of the car acci­dent. How­ever, we chose this date for a rea­son. Every year as we were reminded of our loss and felt the sting of that pain again, we wanted to have a con­stant reminder of the Lord’s faith­ful­ness. Our wed­ding was the per­fect reminder! No mat­ter how much pain we may have gone through or how lost we felt, the Lord was faith­ful to carry us through.

Vitaliy and I have been doing a lot of search­ing lately. You all know that we are in our first year of busi­ness and we are try­ing to nar­row things down and really fig­ure out what we want Prokopets Stu­dio to be about. Where did our pas­sion begin and where do we want it to go? We had a very inspir­ing con­ver­sa­tion up in Tahoe recently that really cleared things up for us in regards to these things. And a lot of it stemmed from the mem­ory of one pic­ture. Vitaliy has one pic­ture of his fam­ily all grown up, all dressed up and all in the pic­ture together. Sure, they have plenty of pic­tures taken here and there dur­ing life’s moments. And those are fan­tas­tic to have! But those do not replace the impor­tance of hav­ing a pro­fes­sional fam­ily por­trait taken.

Back in 2003, Vitaliy had the desire and felt the respon­si­bil­ity to take a fam­ily por­trait. He had recently taken a pho­tog­ra­phy class and wanted to use some of the things he had learned to take a pic­ture of his fam­ily. He asked every­one to get dressed up and he set up the tri­pod in order to cap­ture the entire fam­ily. Who knew how impor­tant this image would be to us just a cou­ple years later? This image rep­re­sents Vitaliy’s fam­ily and, in a way, it defines Prokopets Stu­dio. Vitaliy took this pic­ture for his fam­ily to have for them­selves and yet it has been used in numer­ous pub­li­ca­tions in order to tell the story of his fam­ily. We have held on to the mem­ory of it dur­ing dif­fi­cult times. And  now it’s even being used to inspire and help define Prokopets Stu­dio. Hav­ing lost 3 of the most impor­tant peo­ple in our lives, brings a whole new mean­ing to our pho­tog­ra­phy. We know what it means to hang on to the pic­tures we have of our loved ones. We under­stand the impor­tance of cap­tur­ing life. These things directly reflect and inspire our work and keep our pas­sion ignited.

As we reflected on these things, Vitaliy and I decided that we want to do a give­away. We want to give one fam­ily a mem­ory like the mem­ory that we have with Vitaliy’s fam­ily por­trait. Just as the Lord used lit­tle things here and there to bring us joy in the midst of our sor­row, we hope this give­away will be a time of joy for one spe­cial fam­ily. We are going to give away one fam­ily ses­sion and $200 in prints to one fam­ily. This is a value of $300 that we are going to give­away with your help. We can’t do this with­out you. We are look­ing for a fam­ily who has a fam­ily mem­ber that has been diag­nosed with a ter­mi­nal ill­ness or maybe has a fam­ily mem­ber that has been liv­ing with a life threat­en­ing dis­ease or dis­abil­ity for many years. It could be your own fam­ily or a friend’s fam­ily. And if you don’t know some­one, pass this along to your friends and fam­ily because they will know some­one. Help us bless one fam­ily with a fam­ily por­trait that they will have to hold on to for gen­er­a­tions to come. We hope it will bring them great mem­o­ries and joy like ours has to us.

Give­away Details

• Think of a fam­ily I described, maybe it’s you or maybe it’s some­one you know. The fam­ily does need to be located in the North­ern Cal­i­for­nia region.
• Email me the family’s name and why you feel they deserve this gift.
• Share this post with friends/family who also might want to nom­i­nate someone.
• Nom­i­na­tions must be received by 11:59pm PST on Fri­day, Sep­tem­ber 4.
  
• The win­ner will be announced next week.

P.S. There will also be a sur­prise gift give away to one lucky per­son who nom­i­nates so send in those emails!