Field training exercise

Some cool exercise images:

Field training exercise

Image by Official U.S. Air Force
Airman 1st Class Koleton Mitchell participates in a 7-mile ruck at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., Nov. 18, 2014. The ruck kicked off a field training exercise culminating the Army Weather Support Course to integrate Airmen with Soldiers before they deploy with an Army unit. Mitchell is a 25th Operational Weather Squadron weather forecaster. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Chris Drzazgowski/Released)

Live-fire TOW 2B exercise [Image 2 of 10]

Image by DVIDSHUB
Paratroopers assigned to Destined Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne) out of Vicenza, Italy, fire a TOW 2B missile during a live-fire exercise at the Joint Multinational Training Command in Grafenwoehr, Germany, Feb. 1, 2014. (Photo by U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Pablo N. Piedra/released)
Date Taken:02.01.2014

Date Posted:02.05.2014 06:52

Photo ID:1161607

VIRIN:140201-A-KG432-170

Resolution:3741×2458

Size:4.55 MB

Location:GRAFENWOEHR, BY, DE

Read more: www.dvidshub.net/image/1161607/live-fire-tow-2b-exercise#…

ICP Exercise 5 (Feb 2010), day 1, candidate photo 06a

Image by Ed Yourdon
Note: this photo was published as an illustration in an undated (Feb 2010) EveryBlock New York City blog page titled "zipcodes: 10025." It was also published in an Aug 13, 2010 GetIn2Shape blog, with the same title as the caption that I used on this Flickr page.

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For our final exercise in my February 2010 International Center of Photography (ICP) workshop entitled "On Seeing What’s Right In Front Of You," we were given the following assignment:

"Using the improvisation workshop we did tonight as a jumping off point, shoot another collection of same type of everyday object, person or setting each day for the next six days. You can use the same subject as you did for a previous assignment or you can pick a new one. Pick something that intrigues you. KEEP IT SIMPLE.

"But do one thing differently this time: use an autofocus camera (or pre set a focusing distance on a manual camera) and shoot your photos without looking at/through the camera’s viewfinder.

"Don’t cheat by using the viewfinder to shoot. Don’t do any post-production cropping with Photoshop. Don’t use work that you shot before this week.

"Try to think about not just what the subject looks like, but also what it feels like when you encounter it. Use your body and reflexes to shoot … not just your eyes. The pictures will probably be off-centered and skewed looking … don’t worry, that is the point!

"Use your "Is It Alive?" handout to edit and bring your favorite six photos as full frame images with you to class next week. Feel free to put a title and words with the photos.

"Trust your instincts. Explore. Be playful."

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With that in mind, I stationed myself on a street corner near my apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It’s a busy intersection, with an express IRT subway stop, a new subway station under construction, two public schools within a block or two, and a highway entrance onto the West Side Highway just a couple blocks away. So there are tons of people all around, all the time — walking and talking to one another, taking their kids to and from school, rushing to catch the subway, chatting on their cell phones or listening to music without paying attention to anyone around the. All I had to do was stand in one place for 30-60 minutes, and hundreds of interesting people wandered by (along with thousands of not-so-interesting people).

On the first day of the 6-day assignment, I took 300 photos; and on the second day, I took a little over 400. I’ve winnowed the first day’s collection down to 10 "candidate" photos for uploading to Flickr, and I’ll be doing the same with each successive day’s collection of "raw" images. From each set of 10 candidate photos, I’ll eventually pick one "keeper" to form the required set of six photos for the class exercise. I’ve taken the liberty of cropping, straightening, and color-adjusting the Flickr "candidates," but whatever gets submitted in the final set of six will be a non-cropped, non-straightened format.

A couple minor technical notes, for those who care about such things: I used a 24-120mm full-frame zoom lens on my Nikon D700, but set it to maximum wide-angle in order to be able to capture the desired subject(s) by just pointing the camera in their general direction. I set the aperture to somewhere between f/8 and f/11, to ensure a good depth of field (DOF), and used the aperture-priority setting on the camera to ensure that the camera would not take me by surprise with a soft-DOF aperture like f/5.6. To ensure that I got a crisp image, even if people were walking quickly (and/or rain was coming down), I cranked up the ISO setting to anywhere between 1600 and 3200, depending on how bright or dark the day was…

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If you have any thoughts or suggestions about these "candidate" photos, or opinions about which ones should be selected for my final submission in the ICP class, feel free to send me a Flickr note, or an old-fashioned email message. Thanks!