I just loved that I was all alone. Perhaps the only one crazy dedicated enough to venture outside to ply his craft.

Here, the four person honor guard created by sculptor Zenos Feudakis stands nobly in the driving snow.

On the north end of the memorial is a “Glass Contemplation Wall” that honors fallen airmen. There are several planes etched on the glass. This shows just one of the planes, looking through the glass toward the three spires which represent the three core values of the Air Force – “integrity first, service before self, and excellence in all that is done”.

Every time I photograph this monument I find it a challenge and suspect I’ll be back again.

Although it looks like the sun is coming up over the horizon, it’s really just a bright spotlight and the fog and mist in the air helped create the cool glow. Setting the white balance to “shade” also helped create the sweet orange color.

This photograph reminded me of some other night photographs that I took when I first got my D700. The following were taken the same night as those of the Air Force Memorial, which I wrote about in August.

Corner section of the Lincoln Memorial

The Washington Monument, looking east from the Lincoln Memorial.

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.

Following a long trip around the tip of Hains Point, my route would the bring me back across the river, past the Arlington National Cemetery, the Iwo Jima sculpture and the Netherlands Carillon and finally, back home.

Ok, back to the post at hand. Since we live only a couple minutes drive from the Air Force Memorial, I went there one evening to take some photographs. Here’s one of my first shots of the night. Due to a rain storm that had passed through earlier, there were some fantastic clouds and setting the WB to shade helped create this fantastic orange glow.

I continued walking around the site and set up shop on a sitting wall that runs most of the site’s length. At this point some tourists, or perhaps locals, showed up and I quickly switched from wide angle to telephoto.

Despite the long shutter speed, this couple held still long enough to make a decently sharp exposure with the U.S. Capitol in the background.

Finally, I tired of the tourists and looked for a completely different angle and found a glass wall that had etchings of jets on it. It seemed quite appropriate for the site and I slid my wide angle back on and got as low to the ground as possible.

This last image is taken from directly beneath the spires, looking straight up. The strange lines are caused by the spotlights highlighting the spires and casting shadows.