Blended Paths

This past Saturday I was asked by my good friend to attend the homecoming of the 214th MP Company. Her husband is a soldier and MP in that company, and she wanted me to be her paparazzi. I had plans to attend a couple of other events but decided to change those plans and complied with her request at the last minute. After all, how many times would this opportunity present itself for me? Hopefully not many!

I took over 700 shots during the one hour wait/homecoming and after going through them all I ended up with only about 100 that I felt were decent. I will, of course, make a disc for my friend that contains all the images, but I have taken the ones I have selected as "decent" and processed them to meet my own approval. The sunlight was harsh (the time of day was between 12:30PM and 1:30PM) and the clouds weren't hanging around to help me out. Because I was doing burst shots at different angles and in different locations throughout this "shoot at will" event, I decided to set my camera up with a few settings that I like to use under most any circumstances and let Aperture help me fix any that might come out completely "blown out."

The odds were NOT in my favor, but I did manage to get those few good shots and after applying some really handsome filters to a few of them I thought I got some great memories recorded. Here are a few of the unedited images that I thought were decent:

Here are a few of the images that I thought looked especially nice with the PX 100 filter applied (Aperture 3):

Here are a few images that I really liked seeing in black and white: