Katie at Homecoming 2019
Class Representative
Our friend Katie was the sophomore class representative at the Homecoming football game last week, and I had the opportunity to take a few photos of her. It is a little-known fact that I sometimes take photos of people. It isn’t quite always just the buildings and landscapes that you usually see here.
As you may know from reading various trip reports and other things around here, our families do lots of things together, such as our 2018 Christmas Disney Cruise and Zach’s Clemson Graduation, just to name two. We have known Katie since she was born. It has been fun to watch her grow up so far!
During the game, we had fun sitting with Katie’s family as we do whenever they are there. It is always good to have a group that you enjoy being around and that you can always count on to share some laughs. And this time around we had other family and friends with us as well. It was a great night!
The Homecoming Court was presented at halftime, and they all lined up for a photo afterward. Katie and her escort Alex are there on the left. As the sophomore class representative, she was not in the running for being named queen, so perhaps there was not quite as much stress over being out there. And yes, the official school photographer got a much more centered photo than I did. I was just in with the rest of the crowd for this one.
And of course Katie’s parents were proud, as you would imagine. I couldn’t miss getting a photo of them together. I am sure Zach was proud, too, but he is off getting his higher education degrees and could not be there in person.
Friends and Family
I know I have said it before, but I hope that you can find some friends who are more like family than friends. They can be a great blessing to you. And you can be a great blessing to them as well.
Good friendships do not necessarily happen overnight. They take some time to grow. When you plant a seed in the ground, you do not immediately have a fully-grown tree the next day. You have to water it, feed it, and wait patiently. But as with a tree, when you have worked over the years to grow those friendships, they will bear fruit for many, many years to come.
People actually ask our families if we are related. We sometimes joke and say that we are, although we can’t remember which of us are actually related. Other times we just say that we should be related.
As I always remind Jaylin, if you want to have a friend, you have to be a friend. That is how you make those friendships grow. Not all of them do grow, but the best ones do.
Be a friend! Have some friends! It will be worth your time.
Bible Verse
A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. - Proverbs 18:24
About the Photos
These Homecoming photos were a little different from what I normally do, both in subject matter and in equipment.
For the first two photos, I used a 50mm prime lens to get the depth of field effect that I wanted. I did not have the aperture open all the way to f/1.8, instead using f/2. That gave the look that I was going for.
For the after-dark photos, I had switched to the zoom lens to be able to zoom in some when the Homecoming court was out on the football field. I also used my old Canon Speedlite flash. For the close-up photos with the flash, I was able to manually dial down the flash setting to 1/4 power. That was still a little bright even at ISO 400 actually, but I darkened up those photos slightly in processing.
Because I was not going for an HDR look here as in many of the recent photos I shared, I just used Luminar 2018 instead. That still gives a lot of control over the processing of Raw files, and it was just what I needed here.
