Category Archives: Just Stuff
This week I’m in Washington working for one of my consulting clients. I left my wife, and daughter at home in Tampa to ride out hurricane Fay. Nice guy, huh? Unfortunately, I couldn’t do anything about it except make sure the house and yard were secure before I left. Fortunately, it looks like Fay is going to pass to the east of Tampa which will put them on the side that gets the least wind and rain. For the most part it’s just going to be a rainy couple of days.
I’m staying at a hotel in Rosslyn that is a block away from the Iwo Jima memorial and only a couple of blocks from the Arlington Cemetery. These are certainly two of our country’s most precious treasures. Joe Rosenthal took the original picture of Easy Company raising the flag on Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1943. Easy Company had been fighting for 4 days and had a casualty rate of almost 40% to date. The picture that Rosenthal captured was actually the second raising of the American flag. Joe Campbell captured a lesser known picture of the original flag coming down and it being replaced with the flag that Joe Rosenthal’s famous and moving image captured.
“In that moment, Rosenthal’s camera recorded the soul of a nation.”
. . .Editors of US Camera Magazine.
“It was like shooting a football game. You never knew what you got on film.”
. . . Joe Rosenthal, Photographer
The picture inspired sculptor Felix Deweldon, who created a life sized model of the photograph. It was later cast in bronze and brought to Washington in September 1954 as part of the Marine Corps Memorial designed by Horace Peaslee.
Here is a picture that I took of the memorial this evening. I processed the image to give it an aged feel with exaggerated film grain.
Later today I will be meeting with Elisa and Anthony to take some fun pictures of them before their wedding which will be Oct. 18. I haven’t had a chance to meet Anthony and it’s been a while since I last met with Elisa so we are going to meet at a coffee shop first and chat for a while. Check back in a day or so to see the their pictures.
Today I had family session with T and his family. They drove over to Tampa from the Florida east coast and I’m honored that they would come that far to have family pictures made by me. Maya is a real cutie. She is one smart little girl, knows the alphabet, colors, numbers and her address by heart. On top of that she has wonderful manners; Erica and T are excellent parents! The session was a lot of fun, we took our time and let Maya get used to the studio. Between taking the pictures and then going through almost 350 images to make their selections, we spent about 4 hours together. Here are a couple from the selections they made.
[gallery=21]I have to admit, I haven’t been 100% perfect, I missed a couple of days but I tried to make up for them by making multiple entries on a few days. Is that cheating? I’m kinda getting into the groove of this and finding it’s a lot of fun. Time and everything else going on is the challenge. Like shooting a wedding all day and not getting home until 12:30 a.m. makes it a little hard to get an entry in that day. Travel and consulting work also makes it difficult.
Thanks to technology, my iPhone, and a really sick App for it, I can now create blogs when away from my home office right on my phone! Next week I will be D.C. for the entire week and will be trying it out. I can’t guarantee that the typing will be perfect but I’ll be able to make entries and even upload pictures from my phone! Should be interesting. Stay tuned.
