I’ve been doing many graduation photographs lately. Graduates come in all ages. I received a call from a mother who wanted pictures of her son, who was graduating from kindergarten during the pandemic. The school didn’t bring in a photographer this year because everything was shut down. So after the shutdown was over, she called me, and I photographed her son in the studio. He was a great kid, full of energy, and was very happy to be here. I created a few photographs of him wearing the mask that all of us need to use right now.

My second graduate was from the University of Dayton. He is from the Middle East and graduated with an engineering degree. In his home country, everyone has their photograph taken in their robes, and this year because of the pandemic, they had no public graduation. He wanted a good picture to send back to his mother.

My third graduate is a woman who has spent the last number of years working on her Ph.D. in Ministry. She works as a hospital Chaplin. Now everyone at the hospital has to call her Doctor also. She is an interesting person because her undergraduate degree was in music. I first met her when she needed an updated professional photograph for her opera singing career.

   I am also photographing many soon to be high school senior graduates. But they aren’t graduates yet.

Memorial Day 2020

On July 18^th, 1944 Frank Cleary, my Dad, landed at Utah beach 30 days after D Day. He was an artillery forward observer in General Patton’s 3^rd army. He had never been instructed what a forward observer did and was scared. Before he went out on his first assignment, Dad was standing up looking out from inside his tank, General Patten walked up, looked right at him and said, “Your job is to take Brest” and then walked down the line inspecting the rest of the battalion. On August 24, 1944 he was transferred to the 212^th Artillery Battalion. He was asked to volunteer for the position of an air forward scout. The 212^th had taken many causalities and the man he was replacing had died in the line of duty. Frank was a very devout Catholic and knew he had already made it through hard fighting without a scratch. He said to me once “I was saving someone else’s life because I knew I’d be OK.” He was part of an eight-man crew. Two pilots, two observers, a sergeant and three enlisted men. The enlisted men were mechanics and cooks. The sergeant’s job was to find a new place for the planes land every day.  They were ahead of the main army and on their own. They would go up in the air in the morning and call in artillery strikes on the enemy positions.  On December 11, 1944, five days before the Battle of the Bulge, the division was being shelled heavily so they quickly jumped in their planes and went up looking for targets. He and his pilot, Lou Blumberg knew the general direction where the enemy shells were coming from. Every time they would get within visual range the shelling would stop. They decided to keep flying lower and lower over the enemy until someone fired on them, as he put it “We were hoping some enlisted man would get nervous and take a shot at us”. The plane they were in was a light, cloth covered airplane and one rifle bullet could take them down. Finally, a German solder did fire on them, they pulled up and called in the artillery strike. For he and his pilot’s bravery they were awarded the Silver Star for valor. The Silver Star Medal is the United States Armed Forces third-highest personal decoration for valor in combat. The Silver Star Medal is awarded to members of the United States Armed Forces for gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States.

Daffodil Panorama Photographs

Daffodils are one of the first flowers that come up in the spring here in Ohio. I was asked by a client to create two photographs of the 100,000 + daffodils that are planted in their front yard. People stop their cars to look at the spring flowers. Neighbors out walking stop and take selfies; people bring their children over to take photographs with the daffodils in the background. For a few short weeks it is quite a show of color when we need it after the winter. This year more than most with all of us sheltered in place it was great to see that spring had come. My client wanted two 30” x 15” panorama photographs that he could hang in his office. I went over three times to create photographs. First, I went over to scout the location. I wanted to see when the best light was and what the good angles were. I decided that first light with the sun just hitting the house was when I wanted to first go over. I spent about an hour taking photographs but by 9:30 in the morning, the sun was already too high in the sky. I took a few wide shots that showed the landscape and they choose one of these early in the morning photographs. I also wanted to show the personality of the individual flowers. I created several closer up photographs, but the light wasn’t interesting for closeups on that first day. I went back a couple days later on a cloudy day. Clouds act like a large soft light source which render the flowers in fine detail. I created a series of panorama closeups by taking two horizontal photographs pivoted from the same point. Meaning I knew that these photographs would have to be stitched together in PhotoShop. They choose one of these two image panoramas for their second photograph to frame.  I spent time working with the photograph of the house to create the morning light. I wanted the warm glow of the early morning lights. I also helped what mother nature hadn’t done by filling in a couple light flower spots. Every year there are a few spots that don’t flower and with a little PhotoShop help I was able to fill in those light spots. PhotoShop does a good job stitching photographs together, it actually does an amazing job, but there are always areas of the photograph that I have to manually create to make the photograph work. I won’t tell you what parts I put together myself, but the finished photograph turned out just the way I wanted. This was a very nice spring project. Especially this year with our stay at home, social distancing that we all have had to do.

Here are three images from my Wright Brothers – Then and Now series that are from the time period of 1901 - 1902 when they were flying kites and gliders to determine aerodynamics of wing shapes. Maria and I went to Kitty Hawk, NC in the summer if 2016 to visit the Wright Brothers National park and spend the week at the Outer Banks. Beautiful place, I would highly recommend going there if you’ve never visited. We spent the entire day July 21^st there. Thank you, Maria, for spending your whole birthday at the national park. I had many historic photographs for the Wright Brothers time at Kitty Hawk but didn’t know exactly which one’s I would be using. I created 500 – 600 image that day so I would have an inventory to use. When I got back to Dayton, I began editing my photographs and deciding how I could get them to work with the historic photographs I had. Here’s what I came up with.

Kite Flying: The historic photo taken was taken in 1901 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina when the Wrights were just working with kites. During the summer, in the afternoon the park rangers start passing out kites. I view this photograph as a form of street photography, and it’s meant to be fun. I like the little girl with her mother and especially the man in the right side of the image trying to get his kite in the air. I think the quote works well with this image. On the technical side there was quite a bit of moving people and kites around to make a good composition. I worked hard to make the historic photographs integrate with my photograph.

The quote is from Orville in a letter written to Katherine. I liked Orville’s sense of humor. “We tried it with the tail in the front, behind and every other way. When we got through Will was so mixed up he couldn’t even theorize. It has been with considerable effort that I succeeded in keeping him in the flying business at all.”

View From The Top Of Big Kill Devil Hill:  My image was taken from the top of Big Kill Devil hill. This may be one of the images where I was almost exactly in the same spot where the historic photograph was taken. I lined up my horizon line with the horizon of the Wright Brothers photograph. The location of the Wright Brothers barn in the foreground was almost in the exact location in both photographs. Octave Chanute was an American civil engineer and aviation pioneer. He provided the Wright brothers, with help and advice, and helped to publicize their flying experiments. The Wright Brothers read Chanute's book, Progress in Flying Machines, and they wrote to him. He quickly saw the genius of those two quiet young men. So, he sent his own assistants to North Carolina to work with them. By 1902, the Wrights were making 600-foot flights in fully controllable gliders. The airplane was finally ready for an engine. The next year they took off and flew under power. The quote was from the first letter Wilbur wrote to Octave Chanute.

“For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life. I have been trying to arrange my affairs in such a way that I can devote my entire time for a few months to experiment in this field.” Wilbur Wright letter to Octave Chanute 1900

Gliding off the top of Big Kill Devil Hill: This is an image looking up at Big Kill Devil hill with the Wright Brothers monument at the top of the hill. The quote is from one of the numerous letters Wilbur and Octave wrote to each other. What I liked most is at the end of this letter, Octave wrote “Please take plenty of snapshots”, which they did.

“It has occurred to me that you would get still flatter glides by making sure that the center of gravity coincides exactly with the center of pressure, and possible by decreasing the angle of your rudder to 4 degrees. Please take plenty of snapshots.”  Letter from Octave Chanute to Wilbur Wright, August 19, 1901

It’s always my please to help United Rehabilitation Services with photographs of their Ambassador for the Duck regatta every year. United Rehabilitation Services of Greater Dayton (URS) offers a wide-array of programs with a variety of person-centered activities, focused on enhancing the physical, social, and emotional needs of children, adults and seniors with developmental or acquired disabilities from throughout the Greater Dayton Region. The 17th Annual URS Rubber Duck Regatta, presented by Synchrony, will be Saturday, September 19, 2020! The event will be held in conjunction with the Hispanic Heritage Festival at RiverScape MetroPark. Go to their web site to find out about sponsorship opportunities https://ursdayton.org/ducks/.