Back in My Element... Sort of...

I don't get excited about shooting stagnant stuff.  Like I've said before, I prefer to be the fly on the wall, stalking the outskirts of a room, the forgotten photographer documenting history in the making.  I get excited about shooting events, people, action.  Training my eye to pick up on the emotions of a room, aware of the expressions on faces, waiting for the smile to break before I snap the shutter.  That's what lights me up.

According to plan, I should be posting a blog with the results of my challenges, the second of which I completed in Augusta yesterday afternoon.  The captions are written, the photos are toned, and quite frankly, I'm bored with it.  And it's my blog, so I'm gonna do what I wanna do. So there.

This morning, I was back in my element, my favorite - or close to - my favorite place to be.  My prey was a formation of soldiers again.  Matt's best friend, Beka, took command of an AIT (Advanced Individual Training) company this morning, and I lugged my camera bag along to document the momentous occasion. It was a little different from the Change of Command ceremony I've covered before, but according to a trusted source, an officer or two mistook me for the PAO (Public Affairs Officer.)  Beaming Smiley Face.

My last Change of Command Ceremony was the Sergeant Major of Cadet Command at Fort Knox.  It was my first official event as a PAO Intern, it was indoors, and I had the reigns. Or most of them anyway.  This time it was Captains switching Company Command, I was a civilian spectator, it was freezing, and I had to sit. And stay. Which is a challenge for me with no treat to balance on my nozzle at the same time.  Combo the sit-and-stay command with the frigid 34 degrees, and I can't say the series are my best.  They're all the same angle, and I was battling early morning overcast on a 300mm with my shivering body.  In some cases the shivering body won.  But I still had fun, and I'm looking forward to Matt's Change of Command in February, this time armed with a couple tips from today's experience.



Apprehensive smiles.  Captain Rebekah Vaughan (don't forget the second "A"), readies for the ceremony.

 
Beka's dad was borrowing a camera that shoots with a manual lens (ack!).  I was surprised, but he said it's what he's used to, and that all of the lenses to his 35mm film camera are manual focus.  He's a brave soul.




Beka introduced her mom and Matt to Private Garlick, who was given the honor of presenting the yellow budding roses to Beka's mom, and was recently accepted to USMA West Point, Beka and Matt's Alma Mater.


Beka's right hand man, First Sergeant Gonzales, leads her soldiers in the ceremony.  As Company Sergeant, the First Sergeant is in charge of Echo Company's Platoon Sergeants.


A collection of Beka's young soldiers were given a variety of duties at the ceremony, including detail (who set up the reception), presentation of roses, and distribution of programs.  Various duties like these teach the soldiers how much work goes into ceremonies, building discipline and respect.


The program, featuring the former Company Commander and the new Company Commander.  Captain Kimbrell relinquished command to Captain Vaughan to pursue a Master's Degree and Teaching stint at USMA West Point.  Ironically, it's the same path both of my own USMA Alums plan to follow when they finish their jobs at Fort Gordon.


Echo Company's XO (Executive Officer), First Lieutenant Hur, was the voice of the ceremony, introducing various points of the process, as well as reading the bios of both captains.  For those of you less Army-lingo savvy, an XO serves as the commander's other right hand man, helping to keep things organized and learning the ropes of command so they may be prepared when they are promoted to such a position.


Command stand at Parade Rest during the Army Song.




Roses are presented to the families of both captains, each symbolizing the path of command, and thanking the families for the sacrifices they must make for a successful command.















The process of passing the guidon begins.  The Guidon of each company is an honored representation of the company's accomplishments.  In ancient times, warriors would return home with the flags of their enemies to signify their victories.  The tradition has been continued, donning the honor of carrying The Guidon to a soldier that represents every aspect of The Army Values.


The Passing of the Guidon signifies the official moment that the previous commander steps down, literally passing the weight, honor, and responsibility of command to their successor, via an honored higher-ranking officer.  Having a third party pass the Guidon from commander to commander symbolizes the reliability of command - that no matter what happens, someone will always be there to protect and direct the soldiers.








That's it! Captain Rebekah Vaughan just took command!





On the walk back to their starting point, Beka and Captain Kimbrell cross over behind the Lieutenant Colonel, switching positions so that Beka now stands in the rank of Company Commander.  When facing the company, she will stand at the right hand of Lt Col Manning.





Battalion Commander Lt Col Manning welcomes Beka and wishes Cpt Kimbrell well.


Cpt Kimbrell thanks all those who made his command possible, including a tear-jerking appreciation of his father, who "taught him how to be a man, father, and son."





Beka's "one minute speech, give or take four seconds."  We were grateful for her brief, but complete speech, all of us listening with visions of scarves and pigs in blankets dancing in our heads.


Beka salutes former command...


... and makes her first command.  "Sound off, wolf pack!"


And so they howled.




















Irrelevant, perhaps, but I couldn't help it.  She's just so darn cute!

I promise I will actually post the results to my challenges next week, along with a promised tutorial on paper effects in photoshop.  For now, however, I have a run to catch up on, mushrooms to stuff, and a nap to take.  Have a wonderful weekend!

The Tutorial Times: Bokeh Holidays

Despite my babbling, ranting, and philosophical searchings of society, part of this blog's purpose is to showcase my talents and give me an outlet to improve my professional work.  Most of the time, the focus will be photography, but since my love affair for Photoshop has been going strong for over six years now, I will have to pay homage to it every once and again.  Today is one of those days.

In the process of editing a few photos for a brochure I designed at my previous place of employment, my dad took a peek over my shoulder.  To feed his insatiable curiosity, I showed him my process of editing this particular photo.  It was a shot of an adorable little girl getting her face painted at a Fall Festival. Her smile was bright and sincere, but her eyes were closed. Like most photogs, I started with Curves, adjusted the highlights and shadows, brightened the midtones, touched up a couple harsh spots, etc.  Then I worked some magic to open the girl's eyes and touched them up to make them brighter and even more adorable.

My dad's reaction: "You're a magician!"

Aw, shucks, pops. *scuffs toe and blushes*

One of the great joys of photography is the capacity to create something beautiful from ... well just a something.  My project today was to take a mediocre family portrait that I took last Christmas Eve and, mixed with a few tutorials and some individual ingenuity (if I do say so myself), to fashion a Christmas Card.  I already know my family won't use it, since my parents tend to write wordy letters of what we did this year, etc, but hell, it David Copperfield away the past three hours and gave me a blog.  I'm happy.

The typical greeting card is just a touch off from a 4x6 photo, generally a bit bigger.  But, as of late, card companies are building their template in all kinds of sizes.  So I stuck to my personal favorite proportion, which fits the general greeting card envelope with a touch extra confetti room - 4.25x6.  That way you can slip a snapshot in there as well.

I wanted to quick christmas-y backdrop - a tree decorated with twinkly lights.  Due to copyright laws, I can't just google it, so I hunted through a few free stock photo sites, to no avail.  So I made things more complicated and decided to re-create the backdrop floating around in neverland (ie: my brain).  I won't divulge all of my secrets, but I used the same technique from a tutorial I used a couple years ago for grass, added an extended motion blur, and voila, abstract-ish pine needle-y effect.

Now the lights. In photo-world, the effect of blurred twinkly lights is called a "bokeh effect." There's a complicated-ish science to achieving the bokeh effect when you're shooting with a camera, but the basic gyst is having a "fast" aperture (ie: a big giant hole that lets in more light) and the right size lens to properly portion the light-to-face ratio (if you're using the bokeh effect as a backdrop to a portrait - which is gorgeous). I'll link a website with a bokeh effect tutorial with my sources. I ended up using someone else's bokeh tutorial to fashion my own. I layered his suggestion with a few blur and opacity effects to get the look I wanted.





The tutorial is actually kind of genius, aside from it not telling you how to manipulate the brush settings to make the crazy-randomized-twinklies. So I winged it, bumping up some scatter and various jitter features to really hype up some randomnessosity.



Then, I grabbed a family photo, used the magnetic lasso to quickly separate the peeps and drop the background (do other touch-ups with the lasso tool, holding down opt to get rid of pieces, and shift to add), and moved them over to my project.





I learned a long time ago how to get rid of the harsh effect on the outside of a dropped image, but I'm attaching a tutorial that gives you one of the thousands of ways to do it. It's not wholly accurate, though. The "feather" option is under Select>Modify. And personally, I find it more efficient to feather the edges of the inverse of your layer selection, rather than feather the actual image. So you select your piece that's standing out too much (in this case, my family), select the inverse. Go to Select>Refine Edge, and Expand it by a pixel or two. Then Go to Select>Modify>Feather. Voila.




Add some text with some fun effects to it. A quick, easy, and neat way to give your text some depth and make it pop is to use some combo of drop shadow, internal shadow, satin, and bevel/emboss. In my case, I wanted to make the text a bit thicker before I added the effects, so I put a stroke on it that was the same color, smart object, rasterize, and then went ahead and treated the thicker, rasterized text as I would usual text, adding all of the above.




Then I painted over the edges to keep the eye drawn in rather than bouncing to the edges of the image, and I'm done!





In all perfectionist honesty, I would probably touch up the glare on my mom's glasses a bit, and made the text a festive, textured, plaid ribbon, but quite frankly, I'm out of time. So perhaps next week I'll spend some time on turning text into a 3D effect ribbon... perhaps. For this week's photoshop tutorial, however, I bid you Adieu!

Sources:
Grass - My Ink Blog
Bokeh - Abduzeedo
Feather Edges - Genius DV
Other fun Christmas Tutorials to come :)

Topic Rhetorical

Two weeks.  A handfull of days and I'm already sitting here staring at a giant blank white space.  Goals of daily blogging, the mantra of practice, practice, practice, and a non-stop voice in my head that never shuts up is what makes me stretch out and stare... followed by getting to refill my water bottle, and curl up and stare... Shuffle around the sixteen pounds of laundry from a smirking washing machine and a sighing dryer, open the laptop and let the blue-white glow wash my knuckles as they sit quietly, waiting for my brain to assign a chore, as I stare... Spend an hour or two in a vicious hunt of a healthy appetizer to bring to holiday parties (WHY must everything have cream cheese in it?) and return to the journal with pen in hand to doodle little abstract patterns between blogging brainstorms, while I stare.  My years of writing columns for the high school paper prepared me for these days.  Suck it up, swallow the "blehhhhhh" feeling, switch the TV playing a myriad of celebrity perfume commercials to mute, and starting babbling.  At some point or another, a topic will bubble up from the nonsense.  And it's my blog instead of a published column,  so I get to leave the paragraph of babbling before my topic exposes itself. Aren't you the privileged few.  Smiley Face.

Why do I do this?  Why babble, when I have nothing to say? Why fill the white space up and shoot it into cyberspace for my three and a half loyal readers to view?

When I got a call from a mysterious 803 number this morning, and the woman on the other end of the cell phone tower web asked me a question, my reaction was the same as it is now: "... Uuuuhhhhh..."

Being a professional in the communications world, that's ... not good.

The question?  "What's your passion? Where do you want to focus with your career?"

I know the answer.  I've known the answer for well over a year now.  The answer is "military photojournalism."  The answer is "Visual Communications with a purpose." The answer is "Learning how to be the best visual communicator possible." But when a professional of the communications world who has friends in every sector of business in the Southeast pops that particular dotted-squiggly, what's the golden egg answer?

People want to hire someone who is going to stick around, who is going to commit to their company, love working there, enjoy their work so much that they marry it.  They want someone who is so specifically focused in their mission statement that their cubicle is decorated with the logo that writes their checks rather than a bobble head of the Philly Eagles mascot. Which is what I'm willing to do for the Army...  But how do I answer the questions of people who may connect me to potential employers until the Army realizes my unrequited love could be the relationship of a lifetime? Are companies going to be ok with the answer "I just want to be good?"

The blog topic, it seems, is rhetorical.

Chow Challenge Results (Challenge #1)

After a lovely lazy holiday, I've finally settled into the hole of the futon to crank out the Chow Challenge results.  Enjoy.

Challenge: Using Food Photo Blog advice, practice food photography techniques on thanksgiving dinner.


 Results:
 
I shot everything with my only prime lens - a 35mm.  I set it to Aperture mode, and decided to start out taking advantage of the beautiful natural light that seeps in through my mom's kitchen window.  Then the story-teller in me kind of took over...




I dabbled in slowing the shutter settings to show the quick movement of my mother and sister as they dressed the turkey.


Different and a little spooky, right?










There's some nice natural light that comes through the dining room window, but since it was about 4pm, it was disappearing fast, and I'm afraid I was desperately trying to avoid using fill flash.


One of the blogs said to "get low," so I practiced with a table setting I found on Pinterest.



Winning over aperture without sacrificing shutterspeed so much I would need a tripod become a challenge as the sun continued to steal away with my light.




A little too backlit, perhaps...




Aperture is too low here, and I lost the detail in the croissant and sweet potatoes in the back. 


One of the rules was to "avoid the bird's eye view," but I wanted to show the fun swirl in the drink, so sacrifices were made.

Conclusion: I don't exactly consider this challenge won.  I could have done better if I had afforded myself the time to invest in a fill or bounce flash. Overall, I believe I'm a journalist through and through. My patience is challenged with "studio work." I prefer subjects that are less ... stable, if you will. Still, I obviously should spend a little more time on lighting and composition of static subjects. After all, practice is practice, and everything will improve the eye for more exciting work in the future, right? ... Right... Maybe I can find a sports event somewhere to shoot...