January 2012 update
With the initial completion of the Washington Auto Show, here’s what’s happening this week. The auto show is on hold until the 2011 swimming competition has been completed. Once that’s done, the auto show will be run. The process for this job is automated, so that once the image selections have been done, the computer will be doing all of the processing automatically. That means it’s a two-day turnaround once the development process has started. After that, I’m going to return to eating down my sports coverage that took a hit in 2010 after the personal disaster. While that’s running, the coverage of the 2012 Tuba Euphonium Workshop will be started, starting with the video file selections. I can take paid requests for files from this event beginning today. Please don’t ask for free copies of anything. I get them a lot, and I now turn them all down. Simply put, it’s too expensive to give anything away on demand, and it’s not reasonable considering my time and financial expenses to provide this work. If you want to buy something that hasn’t been finalized yet, I can handle that. Normal completion time for the Tuba Euphonium Workshop is nine months. It’s going to be different this year because of the addition of video, all of which has to be reviewed, edited, and finalized. It looks good so far, though. So, back to swimming before the next competition begins this month.
Day 3 of the swimming competition has been completed. Day 4 coming up next.
The 2011 Eastern Trombone Workshop
The coverage of the 2011 Eastern Trombone Workshop has been completed. The final image count was 2,200, smaller than the previous two years, but still some of the best coverage around. The albums are available in the store archive here:
http://arshutterbug.exposuremanager.com/g/etw_2011
First Snow of 2012 in Washington, D.C.
The snow over Washington, D.C. started on the morning of January 9, with big flakes that began freezing to surfaces in the afternoon. The snow has subsided now, but the temperatures are dropping past the freezing mark.
Celestron C-11 EdgeHD First Light
My new Celestron C-11 EdgeHD telescope with its CGEM DX mount had its First Light experience tonight. After being clouded-out two nights in a row, I decided to take advantage of the clear night. The Moon was the first visual sight. It was a bright, sharp, and full-frame view of the surface. Jupiter was next, and that view showed all four Galilean moons, the atmospheric bands, and the Great Red Spot. The overall telescope system is lightweight and manageable. Its flat-field optics mean that there’s minimal distortion in the corners of the visual frame, and the 2-inch diagonal and its large eyepiece round out the feature list. The color reproduction of the lens is outstanding. For more about the telescope, I will let Celestron at CES 2011 give the presentation.
After Christmas, I decided to finally make the trip up to see Gary Hand at Hands On Optics. I was going to get a Dobsonian telescope, but I saw the CGEM on the tripod through the window, and I fell for it. After a long deliberation period to consider the several drawbacks of the Dobsonian, I asked him to talk me out of the large Dobsonian that I was trying to get, and ended up buying the EdgeHD objective instead. Although it was twice the price of the Dobsonian, its aperture is almost three times bigger than the similarly-priced refractor without a motorized tripod mount. I still won’t be satisfied until I am looking at the stars through a shuttlecraft window, but after many years of not having a telescope of my own, this C-11 telescope will finally provide me with my own best tour of the stars and planets from Spaceship Earth.
The night finished with a look at our red neighbor, Mars.
Zombie Carollers in Old Town Alexandria
I bumped into a group of Zombie Carollers in Old Town Alexandria tonight, who were merrily singing Christmas carols that were modified for zombies! Very cute! Shortly afterward, the rain started coming down, so I hope that the carollers were able to find cover and continue their singing entertainment on the city streets.
The 2011 Woodbridge Viking Invitational
The coverage of this year’s Woodbridge Viking Invitational marching band competition has been completed. The albums have been uploaded for print sales here:
http://arshutterbug.exposuremanager.com/g/wvi_2011
The 2,600 photographs contained therein represent the outcome of seven years of band photography. Above a football field in 2004, the first spark of marching band photography began. It was unclear how far it would go, but I knew that I had to take it somewhere far and above where I was at the time. Those who let it grow, and especially those who actively supported the work, have found out what became of that early ambition and effort.
This all started because no one wanted to do it. Band photography in those earlier days consisted of a small company running an operation to organize group photographs of each band after a competition. The photographs of each band were called something like Formal and Silly. Click, flash, click, flash, click, flash… and that was it; then over to the table to get an order form. While the portraits were often very nice, and enjoyable to have, it wasn’t performance coverage.
Digital camera technology after the year 2000 made it possible to do a much larger amount of photographic coverage without the burden of chemical film costs and delays incurred while switching rolls of film. That digital technology developed into a medium that matched and eventually exceeded the resolution of 35-mm film. This new age of photography brought with it new lens technologies and flash memory chips that became less expensive with each new year, making it possible to have fast-aperture telephoto lenses and storage capacities that decades earlier were out of reach.
Digital photography quickly became accessible to many people, but during a time when the number of band photographs should have been increasing dramatically, we instead saw only a marginal increase in coverage that usually came from parents and the students themselves, and rarely was this much better because it lacked the quality and consistency that was possible with the new technology. An unwillingness to invest money in the right camera lenses and take the time to do the processing of the digital negatives meant that much quality was lost to indecision and a lack of effort. The unwillingness to hire the small and upstart photographer further delayed what should have been a time of extensive growth in band photography. People were, and many still are, more willing to spend thousands of dollars on themselves before spending one dollar on a dedicated photographer. Football stadiums from high schools to the NFL became ablaze with tiny flashes of light from thousands of digital cameras, almost all recording the flash-lighted heads of people several feet in front of the camera and the darkness on the field below.
Over the years, we went from the small company doing $20 a print to a big company pushing print packages. The personality declined to that of a cattle farm operation, with people who seemed like they didn’t really care about what they were doing. Eventually, we even lost the companies doing the group portraits, possibly pushed away by a lack of interest in the work or a perceived increase in competition from parent-photographers. Getting these people down with the band during a performance was almost unheard of, and while two companies did eventually step up and start doing some actual performances, they both acted the same, and concentrated mainly on the competitions above the high school level.
It was a game of Spray and Pray with them, uploading low-resolution versions of the digital camera output to a Website quickly and without looking at that camera output, and planning to delete all of the work by date certain. They wouldn’t even cull out the duplicate frames that were so obviously bad. Rules for photographers included a necessity to capture only the upper half of the band member, get every member possible, no section scenes allowed, and no attention was to be given to ensure that any photographic frames were identifiable with the specific performance day. Most of the time, though, these people weren’t around, and so there was a void to be filled.
From the top of the stands to the sidelines and the bus seats, I filled that void. It took awhile to find a home and cultivate the talent, but now I finally have something that few are able or willing to deliver. This is what I never had, but wish now that someone had been able to provide as coverage of my earlier days. Now these albums provide in visual memories a unique look back at the times that we had in marching band, and one day I hope that they will be treasured by the former students in these bands as much as I hold the few photographs of myself as a visual record of our past.
Bands Along the Occoquan 2011
The coverage of the Eighth Annual Bands Along the Occoquan coverage has been completed. The photography is available for sale at Exposure Manager. Coverage includes the following bands:
C.D. Hylton Bulldogs
Brentsville Marching Tigers
Gar-Field Marching Indians
Spirit of Stonewall Jackson Marching Band
Kettle Run Marching Cougars
Woodbridge Mighty Marching Vikings
Potomac Marching Panthers
Forest Park Marching Bruins
Annandale Marching Atoms
North Stafford Big Blue Marching Band
Osbourn Park Marching Yellowjackets
Battlefield Marching Bobcats
Hurricane heading out
It looks like Fairfax has made it through the worst of Hurricane Irene. We had a few power outages, but the new redundancies seem to have worked. Power was restored quickly after each outage, and that’s with a nuclear reactor out of the equation. The wind is still strong, but we’re hanging on. There haven’t been a lot of flooding problems, but it could get worse once the tide comes in over the next few hours.
Hurricane Irene Has Arrived in Fairfax
The force of Hurricane Irene has arrived in Lorton. The wind gusts have become stronger, and the rainfall is continuing. There have been no serious infrastructure problems, yet, but the electrical power is starting to fluctuate.
Earthquake Aftershock
An earthquake aftershock was felt at around 8:08 PM in Lorton. No damage was reported.
