If you’re just here for the pictures, scroll to the bottom.
So once again, I’m a member of the LDS church. You’ve heard us called the Mormons. Individual congregations of our church are called wards. Most wards have something like 200-300 people in them, I think.
I’m also single. They have special wards for single members of the church, presumably to fulfill their social need to mingle with others of their ilk, perhaps with the idea of transforming them, in pairs, from single to married.
There was once a singles ward in Los Angeles that was called the Los Angeles 1st Ward. It grew to be quite massive, so the local church leaders decided to split it into two smaller congregations, one of which retained the original name, while the other became known as the Santa Monica 3rd Ward. Now there were many friends in these two wards who now met in different church buildings on Sunday, and therefore lost much of the contact they had previously enjoyed. To help maintain those friendships, someone, somewhere along the way (I think it may have been Dana Suman) came up with the idea of having a homecoming event every year, complete with a football game and dance.
Well…it’s been many years, and the originators of the concept have all moved on and in most cases been transformed out of their singleness. The tradition lives on, though. This year’s flag football game was held on the evening of Friday, September 24th (the dance got nixed, I gather). I decided to run out and see what I could shoot of it on my 7D, despite the fact that my biggest zoom lens is a Canon consumer 70-300mm with a dizzyingly slow maximum aperture of 4-5.6. So I found myself not being able to notch up my shutter speed very high (I do try to avoid motion blur for this sort of action photography), and I decided to live with noise and just go with a massive 6400 ISO.
I ended up with the following gallery of shots: a collection of compromises. You’ll see plenty of noise, a good deal of motion blur, a lot of cranking up the exposure in camera raw, and plenty of shots that were just plain out of focus because I’m not good enough to focus manually, and my auto focus certainly couldn’t keep up in the poor light. Nevertheless, at least the event was archived. Enjoy.
Oh..and the Silver Monkeys (SM3) defeated the Gators (LA1) 42-35. The first half looked like the beginnings of a blow out, with the Silver Monkeys going up 21-7. The Gators actually had them in the second half due to some phenomenal passing. Unfortunately, they didn’t manage to convert a key fourth down in their own territory late in the game, which turned into an almost immediate Silver Monkey touchdown. They did throw a touchdown pass on what I believe was the first play of the following drive, but that still left them still behind by a score, which turned out to be the final result.
Another outing with the mighty 7D. A friend asked me to shoot a video for her to send as an application piece for a job working in marketing for Virgin Airlines.
A couple of artist buddies of mine wanted to put on an art show. Not having any access to a building to use as a gallery posed no problem. They simply invaded the pedestrian tunnel under Olympic Boulevard at Selby Avenue in West Los Angeles. Kenny (one of the buddies) had me drop in with my 7D and we shot some footage. Here’s the result that Kenny cut together.
So I have two best friends, who I’ve known since high school. It has become our habit to all fly to where one of us lives every Summer and spend some time together. This time, we descended on scenic Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Sean is getting his doctorate in Computer Science. The last day we were there, we visited a dairy where they make fresh ice cream and even griddle up their own waffle cones. You haven’t lived until you’ve sat on a porch, in a rocking chair, overlooking a beautiful, ridiculously green vista on a hot Summer day in the American South slurping up ice cream next to your best friends in the world.
Here’s a gallery of the rest of our voyages, which took us to the beach, Washington DC and the Smithsonian, Colonial Williamsburg, and the DoD’s Camp Peary (of which I got no photos because the whole base is too secret ).
I’m currently sitting in a basement in a lovely colonial home in Germantown, Maryland, guests of the older brother of my good friend Max Fitt. The older brother, Todd, is a nuclear reactor tech and father of two with a fantastic hobby: he builds scale models of Star Wars vehicles. We spent last eventing oohing and aahing at his most audacious creation: a 2.5 foot Star Destroyer.
The thing is rediculously detailed. Todd created much of the surface of the thing from his own molds. The inside has an intricate network of fiber-optic lines which start from some central light bulbs and branch out to the surface of the ship. Todd tells me there are over 1600 distinct light along the surface of the hull. When I have a chance, I’ll post some pictures of the thing. For now, here’s a link to his site, showing images not only of the finished Star Destroyer, but also of the process of its creation:
I’ve had a chance to upload photos of my trip to the East, so here are some pictures I snapped of the Star Destroyer, as well as some of his Millenium Falcon, and two other freighters of his own design.
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