This post brings us back to the early years of Bentley Photography, part 13 if you have been keeping up. In April of 1990 we moved to Winder after selling our house at St. Simons and started our business here. While at St. Simons Chance worked for Charter Health Center and we had a pretty good deal on having our baby if we used a Charter hospital. The closest Charter hospital was Shallowford Hospital, off of I-285 in Atlanta (which we will come back to soon).
When we moved to Winder it was obvious that we would have to have some steady income while we were building up business. We had stayed in touch with the person that I had worked for when I got out of photography school, he actually photographed our wedding for us, and he and his wife owned a children's clothing store in Lawrenceville. Chance went to work for them while I set out to do anything I could to get this business up and running. Our camera room was in the front room for the first six or seven years so when you came in the studio you walked right into the camera room. This wasn't that much of a problem since we did everything by appointment and could work around it most of the time. In the early years we did a lot of weddings at first and then our children's portraits started building up.
On September 19 of 1990 our lives were forever changed. Chance had an appointment with her doctor that morning and during that appointment she was having contractions but they weren't close enough for them to keep her so we came home. Looking back we are sure that they didn't know just how far away home was for us. Later that afternoon the contractions got a lot closer and we took off for the hospital right in the middle of late afternoon traffic. Around the Gwinnett Place Mall area the contractions and pain got really bad and I started panicking and when we arrived at the hospital we went straight to the ER. A few minutes after five that afternoon we welcomed Leslie into the world.
Twenty three years later we couldn't be more proud of the child that came into our lives that day. Leslie has been a wonderful daughter and is very much a family girl. She is in Pharmacy school at Mercer now and we can't wait to see where her life takes her from here.