Scout Photo Contest

For several years I’ve had the great pleasure of serving in the Boy Scout program, helping young men advance through the ranks, learn life skills and lessons and in the process taking many great backpacking trips. As some may know, the Boy Scout program has a merit badge program that encourages scouts to focus on a specific skill.

Back in my days as a scout, one summer my friend and I were at Camp Steiner in the Uintah Mountains working on our canoeing merit badge. One of the skills to learn was tipping a canoe over, righting it and then climbing in. In warm water with a functioning canoe, this is doable. The problem was, we had neither. Camp Steiner is known as the camp with the coldest lake in the Uintah’s and our canoe was missing the Styrofoam flotation from one end of the canoe. Subsequently, when we tipped the canoe over, one end immediate sank leaving the other end sticking out of the water looking suspiciously like a shark fin and there we were left floating in the middle of the lake. Unsure what to do, we floated until an instructor saw our predicament and told us to swim to shore.

Well, that’s a long story leading up to the point of this post, but one of the skills I wanted to help the scouts learn was photography. I arranged a class where we discussed the aspects of photography, camera equipment and then we scheduled a photo competition, photographing some of the national monuments in D.C.

The boys had a great time and I think they learned a lot. One aspect I tried to stress to them is to find a different or unique angle and use framing to vary what would otherwise be an ordinary image.

The following are images I took with a little Canon compact shooter and are my attempt at showing a different look. One of the advantages of a smaller cheaper camera over a larger, heaver and expensive digital SLR is that I would never hold my SLR a few centimeters above the Tidal Basin, like in this shot.

One of the many waterfalls at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial. I balanced the camera on one of the rocks and set the shutter to delay for this longer exposure image.

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial as seen from across the Tidal Basin. Once again a longer shutter speed, balancing the camera on the sidewalk.