Muldrow, Oklahoma -- Kyle Alderson, 15, brought Brendan Shepard (right), who struggled after being orphaned, into READ (Reading Encourages All Dreams), a teens-to-kids tutoring project that Alderson himself founded on Make A Difference Day.

After all the airline delays that day, the last light was just leaving the sky when I got to Kyle Alderson's. We had planned on photographing them on the main street in town because it represented middle America. But we ended up working in Kyle's backyard because we didn't have time to go anywhere else. Primarily, we really wanted to show the relationship between Brendan and his mentor Kyle, so I kept to that image rather than try to put it in a geographical context.

There were a couple of times when I had them posed over the gate, that Brendon would just look over at Kyle. With this portraiture work, it's not like documentary photography where you're photographing whatever's there without influencing it at all. With portraiture, I'm directing people a bit and helping their body language to come across in the way I want it to on film, but in this case, it was Brendan who gave me the idea.

Photo Essay by Charles "Stretch" Ledford
StretchPhotography.com