“They became children again in that moment, and I saw their hard, adult exteriors just collapse, and the true essence of humanness came out. I loved such seeing a beautiful human experience in front of me. It was unbelievable, but I got to witness it. I was so honored to be part of the show.”

Baker’s Relative Race experiences began after she graduated from BYU in 2016. She had worked as a video editor on different BYU-TV shows and was invited to work as a still photographer on Relative Race that year. She became part of the ten-person crew who would accompany one of the competing teams on their journey.

Each crew had a producer, a director of photography, camera guys, a sound guy, a grip guy, production assistants, the still photographer (Stephanie), and her assistant. They traveled with four vehicles—one of which was a duplicate to the car driven by the competing team. The duplicate car was used for shooting B-roll (background/filler shots used to supplement the main footage).

The days on the road were grueling for the crew and the contestants. There was shooting and a lot of reshooting from different angles. But the reunion experience between family members was never staged. “I want people to know that the meeting their family is real. Those reactions are real,” says Baker.

Her hardest experience during the 12 seasons turned out to be her most meaningful experience.

It happened when Preshious, a member of the green team, met her father for the first time in season four. The reunion was going to be filmed in a living room, so Baker had to use a blimp—a soundproof housing that would muffle her camera’s mechanical clicks—but would also limit the ability to adjust camera settings.

As it turned out, the camera didn’t work and she missed taking climactic photographs of the reunion–the money shots, as she called them.

“I was devastated. It was mortifying. I tried to get some shots of them together. Tried to get the emotion of their faces, of them hugging and holding each other. I did what I could and then I just went into the walk-in pantry of the house and I just bawled.”

The producer found her there and shared a new idea. They were going to a park to take some group photos and they wanted her to do it, kind of like a family photo shoot they could use in the video.

“I am a wreck now. I can’t think. I am in fight-or-flight mode. And now you’re gonna spring this on me after, like, the worst experience of my career just happened, and now I have all of this pressure. Everyone’s gonna be watching me, all cameras on me, and, I have to just show up at this place and automatically know where to shoot them, how to direct them. And the lighting was terrible because it was not the right time of day,” remembers Baker.

She did her best, but in going through the photos later realized they were terrible. Every one of them was “absolutely awful.” Her thoughts were that once the producer and production crew saw the photos they would think she was a fraud and never hire her again.

“I honestly got down on my knees, and I prayed. I was like, ‘God, the brother of Jared gave you 16 stones. They were just glass rocks. And you touched them and you made them shine. Please God, please, can you touch these photos and make them shine, where anyone who sees them thinks they’re good, they’re adequate. Can you make it so that people see something different than what’s on the paper or on the screen?’ ”

She went to bed that night hoping that the producer would never ask for the photos. But months later he did and she sent them to him, worried that now everyone would know she was a fraud.

But what she heard back from him was the opposite: “’Stephanie, these are absolutely amazing. These are beautiful. Thank you so much.’”

“I completely forgot about my prayer, but that moment, I remembered. God reminded me, ‘Do you remember your prayer?’ And I just burst into tears. God made these shine. He made them shine. Because I know what they looked like, but he saw something different.”

“That was my big miracle moment that has really set my testimony. In that moment I realized God truly knew me and was aware of me.”

“That was the worst day, and then the best testimony builder as a result of it,” she says.

(Season 17 of Relative Race begins Sunday, September 13, at 7:00 PM CST on BYU-TV. Other seasons can be watched at www.byutv.org/relative-race.)