GIF REEEE

I’ve been playing with some pix the last couple days. I went through a batch of 239 I acquired on a field trip about three months ago. It was a band trip. I took the Perry Panther Regiment somewhere or another to compete. Looking it up in my calendar it was at East Coweta High School. It was a very nice new facility south of Atlanta. Very nice. I imagine it is probably a suburb with some high end residents.

One of the things that stunned me, and I didn’t think to take even a phone picture of it, was the hospitality room that was provided for bus drivers. I assume it was open to other people too, but I’m not sure who if anyone. Everything was new. The facility probably wasn’t even a whole year old. They had an extremely nice stadium set up. There was a two story building on one of the end zones where the hospitality suite was located on the second floor. Downstairs was a concession stand if memory serves. They also had food trucks set up in the area.

The hospitality suite had three food stations/tables set up. One had salty snacks. One had sweet snacks. And then there was a hot station where there was some excellent catered barbecue. It was all top quality. There were multiple volunteers keeping up with everything. From the room there was an excellent view of the football field. There was a balcony also that could probably have had twenty people right up on the rail, more behind. It was fancy for a high school.

Anyway I got many photos. I only took along my 50mm prime lens. I can’t really bring along much kit due to space restrictions. I only have my little overhead glove box to store personal items. The rest of the bus is filled to the brim with students, their uniforms, and various things like water flasks and snacks and bags and whatever.

I browsed through the batch and there are some nice shots. It takes a good while to parse that many images. I can only make picks of things I think are worth remembering whittling it down considerable. In this case 31 images. That doesn’t mean the other images aren’t decent. It just means based on gut instinct and a quick scan I narrow down the files I will spend further tine considering in the short term. I will undoubtably go back and find some more good stuff, but for now these are the ones I’m going to look at.

One things I’ve been doing in some cases at events like this is to shoot a sequence of images as something happened in real time. My camera can shoot a couple frames every second, which is much less than video, but can produce cool, I think they’re cool, animations. I’ve been playing with this technique and way to improve it, which you can see in some of my past blogs.

So there was a nice long sequence of this marching band walking past me that I captured. I have no idea who they are, but I loved their uniforms. I love purple, so these jumped out at me upon immediately seeing them coming. I think there were about 54 frames that compose the animation I made and am posting in the blog post. I saved it as a .gif file which I pronounce with a g.

I expect to continue playing with this batch of band pictures in the near future. I see some potentially cool stuff. But for now I am showing this.

I kinda hate to go there, but I feel compelled. Today President Trump has announced he will address the nation tonight at 6:30pm, I’d guess eastern time, which is about 40 minutes from when I type this. Im very worried that he is going to declare war on Venezuela. I know nothing has been said about congress voting on this in the news, which seems nearly impossible for something that big to go unreported by someone. Granted I’ve only been watching mainstream news tv since I got home from work.

Without congress it would be illegal as I understand it for him to declare war or invade a sovereign country. He’s already been playing with the law in ways that are at best debatable concerning his ongoing campaign against alleged drug boats, which has gone on longer than it should based on the law. That is to say the president has the legal ability to use the military for actions in emergency circumstances up to a certain number of days without getting a declaration of war from congress. I’m worried he is going to thumb his nose at the law and go in illegally. I suppose it’s possible he went through congress as legally required. I’m not sure what exactly is required of congress to make it official. I’m worried that with the majority the MAGAs currently enjoy they will simply go to war without any Democrat support. It may be dubious but the majority MAGAs wouldn’t do anything nor would the MAGA Supreme Court. That would open up a whole new world of bad things that I won’t go into now.

I want to post this before he makes his address. I will look at typos and edits after the fact. 30 minutes until the nationwide address.