Time for an update from Missouri!

The work here at CEF International Headquarters has been going splendidly. The 2014 CEF Calendar has been designed, the majority of pictures for each month have been chosen, the text explaining these pictures has been written up and the plan is to send it off for the first round of reviews tomorrow! Along with the work on the calendar, I’ve been doing a lot of design work for MissionTalk, brainstorming ideas for growing Lenspiration this year, and taking pictures on my spare time, of course. Here’s a little story from latest excursion that I copied over from my blog:

As I walked to dinner this evening, I couldn’t help but notice the beautiful cloud formations in the sky. The past few days have been either very cloudy or completely clear, so I  knew the sunset was going to be pretty nice tonight. I requested a carry-out dinner and walked back to my apartment to grab my camera. One question nagged me all the way: what should my subject be?

This is the kind of question I ask myself all the time. Beautiful clouds and dynamic lighting should really only be the complements of a good subject. And this truth has been ever circling in my brain ever since my arrival here a week or so ago. I haven’t had to do much scouting to know that, without a car, there’s not much to shoot around here. And that’s why I didn’t really know where to go after grabbing my camera.

As the perfect light approached and the clouds began to light up in the south, I finally had to settle with the fact that there was nothing but this big pond and the CEF IHQ campus in the background to serve as a subject. That’s when I began to play around with this little waterfall. And that’s when I got a spark of hope! Shooting vertical and squatting on a rock in the middle of the stream gave just the right perspective for including the flowing action, the wispy sky, the colorful reflections, and an angle on the buildings that minimized the visual-clutter that usually surrounds subjects of this nature.

It’s instances like this that make photography so much fun. Not all my pictures turn out this way, but you can view a few more shots from around the CEF IHQ campus in this album.