In my spare time, I like to make game addons and modifications for different PC games out there.  So for the past few years, I’ve been working with a series of games made by Bohemia Interactive.  Their mil-sims are used by various governments and armies around the world for training of all sorts including mission execution, radio protocols, logistics, proper procedures training, group movement training, plan execution, etc.  The civilian version of these mil-sims is known as Arma2.  Currently, it is the 5th most popular download on Steam, which is pretty popular.

Anyway, I recently released an addon for the game of a small unmanned aerial vehicle called the RQ-11 Raven A.  The version 1.51 update has a lot of changes.  Here’s a link to the download:

http://www.gamefront.com/files/21693493/RQ-11_RAVEN_ARMA2OA_VERSION_1.51.rar

VIDEO:

RQ-11 RAVEN A

Author: FEINT (Jon Hillenbrand)

Concept date: April 1, 2012
Release date: May 4, 2012
Update date: May 5, 2012 (version 1.1)
Update date: May 12, 2012 (version 1.51)

Contacts:
=================
Web: http://www.jonhillenbrand.com

Required game: Arma2: Combined Ops
=================
Tested with Arma2: Combined Operations.
Tested with ACE2

Required addons: 
=================
CBA

Description: 
=================

 Originally Posted by AeroVironment,Inc.

The RQ-11 Raven A is a a lightweight unmanned aircraft system designed for rapid deployment and high mobility for military applications, requiring low-altitude surveillance and reconnaissance intelligence. The Raven can be operated manually or programmed for autonomous operation, utilizing the system’s advanced avionics and precise GPS navigation. With a wingspan of 4.5 feet and a weight of 4.2 pounds, the hand-launched Raven provides aerial observation, day or night, at line-of-sight ranges up to 10 kilometers. The Raven delivers real-time color or infrared imagery to the ground control and remote viewing stations.

This addon gives the Arma2:CO player the ability to assemble and operate an RQ-11 Raven.

FEATURES:

• Backpack that can be turned into a blanket of disassembled Raven parts
• Raven that can be assembled and disassembled
• Raven that can be carried in the back of a pickup (somewhat carefully)
• Custom sounds for beeps, servos and engines
• Colored addActions for ease of visibility
• Realistic altitude limits based on real-world data (10 meters to 150 meters AGL)

• Point and click auto flight
• Auto landing (returns to Ground Control Station (GCS))
• Accurate launching of the Raven using setVelocity to simulate throwing in the direction you look
• Ability to carry and drop Raven
• Ability to assemble and disassemble Raven to and from a standalone backpack
• Custom sounds for servos, engine noise and flight/landing complete indicator
• Post-landing strobe light and beep for night retrieval of Raven for recovery in tall grass, at night or in urban environments
• Strobe and beep test and reset functions
• Ground Control System camera with realtime data streams:
  • Distance of Raven from GCS
  • Current altitude ATL
  • Current azimuth of camera (compass direction)
  • Current speed of Raven
  • Current Date and Time
  • Current camera zoom level (focal length)
  • Current vision mode (DTV, NV, FLIR W, FLIR B)
  • Listing of Raven and camera controls
• Map marker tracking of Raven and Raven’s camera target positions
• Map marks can be made at Raven camera target position indicating time mark was made for target tracking

Changelog/known issues: 
=================
VERSION 1.51
-CBA IS NOW REQUIRED FOR MULTIPLAYER SOUND TO WORK
-ADDED: More zoom levels (11 now instead of 4)
-ADDED: Increased zoom max
-ADDED: new zoom controls (in and out)
-ADDED: Altitude ASL to in-camera data stream
-ADDED: Range limit of 8km (distance from Raven target to Ground Control Station)
-ADDED: marker elipse visible on map when changing targets
-ADDED: Battery limit of 60 minutes
-ADDED: Battery status to in-camera display
-ADDED: Autolanding near player when battery reaches zero percent charge
-ADDED: Camera shuts off when battery reaches zero percent charge
-ADDED: Ability to recharge battery in Raven
-ADDED: Restricted the ability to disassemble the raven when it is recharging
-ADDED: Battery level holds true from raven to raven (can recharge more than one raven at a time)
-ADDED: If you pick up a raven that is recharging, you can see a display of the charge level going up in real time
-ADDED: In-camera compass that tracks the camera position and rotation and zoom level
-ADDED: In-camera battery display shows minutes remaining on charge
-ADDED: Charge Battery action only visible if battery level is lower than 100%
-ADDED: Raven can be destroyed when engine is off (but not when flying)
-ADDED: New sounds for engine startup and engine loop
-TWEAKED: in-camera instructions so they are shorter for people running lower screen resolutions
-TWEAKED: in-camera data stream to better reflect altitude
-TWEAKED: in-camera data stream for easier and faster reading (right aligned right side elements)
-TWEAKED: DTV blurriness
-FIXED: Raven can now be assembled and disassembled from walkable ships (Nimitz, Kuznetzof, P99, BAM, Gnat’s Warships, etc.)
-FIXED: Raven can now approach and land on elevated positions such as buildings and ships at sea (if there’s enough room)
-FIXED: Multiplayer sounds should be heard on all clients now by using CBA
-FIXED: Autolanding was broken on certain maps with fake altitudes (Raven wouldn’t land)
-FIXED: Added minor fixes to autolanding script when autolanding is active
-FIXED: Added minor fixes to new target script when autolanding is active
-FIXED: addActions so that they can’t be activated during team switching by another unit (thanks DeltaForce96)
-FIXED: Missing semicolon in strobe script
-FIXED: Rare disappearing backpack problem
-FIXED: Changed the way the Raven chooses altitude so that it no longer flies underwater when depth of water is below 30 meters

VERSION 1.1
= ACE2 COMPATIBLE
= FIXED RARE “DISAPPEARING RAVEN” BUG WHEN ASSEMBLING
VERSION 1.0
= INITIAL RELEASE (05/04/12)

KNOWN ISSUES:
=Minor texture bug on underside of assembled wing – no big deal.
=Raven can not be damaged while engine is on

Installation: 
=================
1) Extract @RQ-11_Raven folder to your Arma2 directory.
2) Start Arma2
3) Go to Expansions
4) Enable “@RQ-11 Raven [by Feint]“
5) Restart Arma2
6) OPTIONAL: Add example mission to your documents folder under your username

Usage:
=================
1) Open editor.
2) Place a unit
3) Place an empty RQ-11 backpack (Empty > [RQ-11] Raven Backpacks > [RQ-11] Raven Backpack)

(SEE PREVIEW MISSION SUPPLIED WITH DOWNLOAD)

5) Preview mission.
6) OPTIONAL: You can place an already assembled Raven on the map instead (Empty > [RQ-11] Raven Parts > Raven (static))

Credits: 
=================
BARAKA – 3d models and textures
BARAKA – Testing
FEINT – Original concept and research
FEINT – Enhanced Textures
FEINT – Scripting
FEINT – Sound design, recording and editing
FEINT – Screenshots and videos
FEINT – Testing
FEINT – 17 page instruction manual

The Arma2 community is full of very helpful people and without them, this addon would not have been possible. On this particular project, knowledge I gained while working on my Underwater Diving Module and Aerial Refueling Scripts really helped. Please see those readMe files for specific people who helped me along the way.

Disclaimer/License:
=================
THIS IS AN ADDON FOR THE GAME ARMA2:OA (BOHEMIA INTERACTIVE). IT WAS CREATED FOR FUN AND IS FREELY DISTRIBUTED TO THE COMMUNITY OF PLAYERS FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. THIS ADDON IS BEING GIVEN AWAY FOR FREE AND NOT FOR PROFIT. AS SUCH, COMMERCIAL OR MILITARY USE IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED.

THIS ADDON IS NOT AFFILIATED IN ANY WAY WITH AEROVIRONMENT, INC.

ALL SECTIONS OF THIS ADDON ARE FREELY DISTRIBUTED TO THE COMMUNITY AND MAY BE OPENED (UN-PBO’D) AND REVERSE ENGINEERED FOR THE PURPOSES OF LEARNING. HOWEVER, IF YOU WISH TO REPRODUCE ANY PART OF THIS IN YOUR OWN ADDONS OR SCRIPTS, WRITTEN PERMISSION MUST BE OBTAINED IN WRITING IN ADVANCE. THE SOUND EFFECTS MAY NOT BE RE-USED IN ANY WAY AS THEY ARE FROM PURCHASED LICENSES and original recordings.

The author(s) of this software accept no responsibility for damages resulting from the use or misuse of this product and make no warranty or representation, either express or implied, including but not limited to, any implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. This software is provided “AS IS”, and you, its user, assume all risks when using it.

©2012 – ALL RIGHTS RESERVED – JONHILLENBRAND.COM

SCREENSHOTS:
=================

Sometimes at night I think to myself in the way that many can think to themselves when they are separated from the noise of the day.  I often remember dreams or the unreality of dreams and sometimes my mind wanders into a fantastical daydream created in realtime as I let my mind wander.  Unfortunately, this isn’t the best of situations as the dreams that I imagine are devoid of the protection of the dreamscape, that is, the protective shell of unreality surrounded by the vast moat which keeps away rational emotion.  Often when others describe to me their own dreams, they confess to having a reaction to an event or vision that would never occur in the daylight of wakeful rationality.  I feel this is true as well, so when my mind wanders over to the girl with the black hair, the girl who often inhabits my day and night dreams, I picture her in a way that tests my emotion and challenges my higher mind.

Tonight, I see her walking toward me across still water barefoot, her toes making little ripples with each step, her body draped with a flowing white dress that changes to red and back to white with each slow-motion gust of wind in the way a two-sided flag reveals a hidden side or color as the material inflates and releases in gentle waves.  The material of her dress also changes from white cotton to a shimmering red silk not unlike the color of blood or a bright lipstick after a gloss has been applied.  Off to my right is a professional makeup table in heavy white plastic or glossed wood with globes of amber light surrounding a mirror.  The girl with the black hair stares into me.  This is different from the dreams of sleep.  In sleep, I never see into anyone’s eyes.  I am not sure if this is because I don’t look or if the people I dream about never seem real enough to have eyes which reveal life to me.  I am not complaining about this as I have no desire to confuse the dream world with the world of the living, and something comes to mind now. I remember a line from Inception where Cobb is talking to his dead wife Mal, explaining to her that he knows she isn’t real, that she’s just a shadow of the woman he once loved formed from memories and impressions.  This is how I feel about the woman with the black hair as she is like a perfume left in the air after the wearer has gone away.  Her actions in my dreams always seem fine if somewhat unsettling in my dreams and downright disturbing in my waking hours.  I sometimes think that my mind uses memories of her personified by an action linked to an emotion in an effort to categorize or properly store her.  She somewhat exists as a never-ending number like pi, and my mind needs to know how far past the decimal point to quantify for future reference.  Plugging in the emotion is the same as me going to a coffee shop and asking for a number of coffee cups equal to pi and waiting for a response from the confused girls behind the counter who stare blankly back at me.  The emotion, I assume, is to wake me up to the fault in my brain, to the question that needs to be answered by my higher mind.  With pi, I don’t care.  I somehow remember 3.14159 accurately but the number has no consequence to my life.  The girl with the black hair is another matter.  As time passes, accurate memories of her are passively being replaced by fallacies either through preferential comparisons to other female characters in books, realizations after the hundredth review of past events or just the ongoing entropy of my neurons.  Interestingly, in my waking dreams, she looks straight through me; yet in my sleeping dreams, she ignores me.  The waking dream seems to have a cyclical passion/purity to it.  In the sleeping dream, she busies herself with planting apples or some other dream-like activity glancing only once to me as I’m the owner of the apple cart she is sourcing from.  Back and forth she goes for probably twenty seconds, but in my dream I know it has been many minutes of ignoring me.  Then a subtle glance at me and I see her eyes, unusually, and she goes back to her activity, but with a certain fear or hurried action to her body language.  How the dreams can be so detailed bothers me in that they trick me with their illusions of reality like they are preparing to insert these dreams into whatever part of my brain stores memories.  I know the sky is pale white and the ground is brown and full of clay, furrowed and soft.  I also know that we are all surrounded closely by cornfields except on one corner where I can see a road, telephone wires and maybe a cheap American car, burgundy, which fails to move.

The dreams end as they begin, without my control or effort, like feeling a cool breeze off of the lake or the heat flowing from an open oven.

continued from here

Among the many rain-like drops falling from Eve as she emerged from the pool, a single drop, a little larger than the others, caught Adam’s eye.  He studied it in the instant that it existed, a life in the eyes of God, he imagined.  A Truth came to him cloaked in a vision.  As the drop fell, he could see it speeding up faster and faster before reaching a point where it didn’t speed up anymore.  It’s progression toward the ground was then linear having reached a balance between the push of the water surface against the movement of the air out of the way and the return of that air into the wake of the water.  It was an honest mistake that he had never seen it before, he though, and he wondered if Eve could see within his eyes the understanding that had taken hold of him.  In a short instant, the world snapped into relief for him.  He saw her body edged in gold the way the sun was rising behind her, coating the edges of her form yet leaving the front of her body rather blue and gray, almost devoid of color.

He said to her, “There is no color, only that which is revealed by the light.”

Eve studied him and cocked her head.  ”The goodness is revealed but is still there, hidden like a distant shore is hidden by a dense fog.”

“It does not exist without our gaze upon it.  It is our recognition of the color that we appreciate, yet without our eyes, the color isn’t there.  Outside of us, the color does not even matter.”  Adam picked up a large stone.  ”This stone is heavy, but to you is immobile.”  He dropped the stone to the soft mossy ground where it sunk in denting it deeply.  ”We don’t sink into the ground, but the stone does.  The stone is hard to me, but is not hard to Him.  He could make the stone so that it never existed.  So how can color be an absolute without our eyes?  Your hair is golden and beautiful to me but to the butterfly, it is as a field of grass to rest upon.  I have seen this.  Do we even exist without His eyes and ears looking and listening to our prayers?”

He saw a tongue of fire close to the horizon different from the other fires he had seen in the forests of the plains.  It stretched upward into the sky curling like a shallow stream on flat ground searches for the ocean.  Eve stared into his eyes as she walked toward him.  She dragged his brown hair behind his right ear and kissed his cheek but he did not react.  She traced her finger on his forehead and across his eyebrow and down to his temple yet his ocean blue eyes never met hers.  She removed her hand from his face and rested it on his dirty shoulder and turned to look toward the horizon which occupied him with such intensity.  But the earth and sky was only filled with the same beauty which always amazed her and she assumed he was also entranced by the remarkable sunrise.

These bobcat snowplows look even more bad-ass in 6 inches of snow, but no one seems to remember where the keys are, I guess.

The earlier snowless shots are HERE.

A lesser man might take to his blog to complain about his coworkers.  The total and complete lack of work ethic might bother this man.  Seeing them playing video games all day while this man slaves away at the less glamorous aspects of photography might make this man cringe and beg for mercy.  This lesser man might point out the base, foul and annoying aspects of some of his coworkers “talents” for constant and unending variations on belching and his ability to ignore the loudest speakerphone.  Every day.  Every single day.

This lesser man might complain in his blog about trying to “think positive” and having that positive attitude melt away after the twelfth time his coworkers scream at how close that paper airplane was to making it through the door to the office, but that it landed instead on my light kit once again.  This lesser man might feel a slight ringing in his hearing because blasting the soundtrack to The Guardian is preferable to hearing, “HENH!?!?!?!” every time someone says ANYTHING to one of his coworkers.  For example:

LARRY: Want to see this cool game I just found?

ROBERT: HENH?!

LARRY: Check out my high score.  I used the multiball.

DAVID: It seems harder than it should be.

ROBERT: HENH!? belch WHOA! WHERE DID THAT COME FROM.  BETTER THAN COMING OUT THE OTHER END, AM I RIGHT?  HAHAHAHAHA

LARRY: Wow, I’m still going.  I’m a pinball wizard!

ME: (put on headphones)

LARRY: Let’s throw this paper airplane around for an hour!

ROBERT: HENH?!

LARRY: (throws paper airplane which lands on top of my light stand bag)

ROBERT: AHHHHOOOOOOOO, WHERE DID IT GO?

LARRY: It went over the fence.  Don’t let it touch Jon or he’ll punch you in the face.

ROBERT: (knocking over everything) JON, PLEASE DON’T PUNCH ME IN THE FACE IF YOU CAN HEAR ME

ME: no promises

ROBERT: HENH?!

LARRY: He said, ‘no promises’.

ROBERT: OH, JON. WHAT DID I EVER DO TO YOU (throws paper airplane)

LARRY: OH! Just missed my all time score.

DAVID: You were so close.

ROBERT: WHERE IS MY STAPLER! IT KEEPS DISAPPEARING.  CAN I BORROW SOMEONE’S STAPLER PLEASE?!

(Seriously.  I just transcribed all of this from reality.)

A lesser man might transcribe word-for-word the ridiculousness he hears every day and change the names to protect those coworkers.  A lesser man might see a trailer for the upcoming film Act of Valor and hear the words,

“You live your life by a code. It’s your shoreline, it’s what guides you home.”

and this lesser man might be inspired by this and by his own code, an ethical disposition which has been like a precious life-preserver in the face of coworkers who are lazy and who revel in things one might find disgusting, base, foul, juvenile or just plain wrong.  And this lesser man might do a job search on the more difficult days or close himself off or snap at an innocent person who is just ignorant at that moment, and not stupid like his coworkers.

I am that lesser man.

My mom forwarded this story to me that I wrote when I was 8 years old…

Sometimes you preposition snow plows when the forecast calls for 5-8 inches of snow.  In Chicago, this is a good practice.  Today, even though it is 48 degrees out, I can imagine the sun-dried pavement covered knee-deep in powder in 24 hours.  It’s not pessimism, it’s anticipation.

The payoff shots are HERE.

In 2011, I shot more than 20,000 photos, keeping around 17,000 of them, at 343 photo shoots (not including physician headshots).  Someone in my office suggested that I do a, “Photos of the Year,” but narrowing down 17,000+ photos to 24 or so that are the best is maybe too difficult for me to accomplish in one or two afternoons.

So, I’ve narrowed it down to just under 200 picks.  Where I can, I’ve added captions to explain what’s going on in the photo, my impressions at the time, behind the scenes photo setup info, etc.  For now, enjoy this group of my favorites from this year.

Thanks for watching.  Check out the individual pics for the comments on Flickr.

There are many things in this world that are almost perfect.  Pringles, for example, would be perfect if they satiated you.  Unfortunately, you crave more the more you eat which, lucky for Pringles, keeps you purchasing can after delicious can.  My sister used to joke that they were laced with Addicto, a secret additive which made you crave them equally the instant after you swallowed one.  If Addicto exists, there are many more products laced with it such as Coke, Pepperoni Pita Stuffs (discontinued) and a particular sandwich that a woman used to make for me when I was a kid.  Back in early grade school, when I was around 10 years old, there existed this great place called The Deli.  I’m sure they served lots of different types of foods, but the only thing I ever got there was the grilled ham and cheese sandwich.  Since I’ve grown, I’ve tried many different combinations of ham and cheese and bread in a laborious attempt to replicate the recipe only to discover that I will never successfully figure it out.  As the youngest and only boy in a family full of women, my needs were not usually catered to nor acknowledged.  I also had very nerdy parted hair and aviator glasses which made bullies want to beat me up with the same craving as eating a can of Pringles.  I was so nerdy, I even had hand-me-down clothes from my older sisters.  In early grade school, I was given my sister’s used girl jeans.  Even though I was told they were, “unisex,” I could tell by the pattern on the rear pockets that they were only for girls.  So they sat in my drawer for a long time ensuring that I wore my blue uniform dress pants during the hours after school when I would act out desperate scenarios with my GI Joe action figures alone in my room.

Every few weeks, my mother or older sister would bring me to The Deli.  My mind is fuzzy on the details, but the sandwiches I remember clearly.  At home, we had cold cuts which were so uniform that they could have been in the army.  A home sandwich was very orderly with two slices of identical meat, mustard and two pieces of dry white bread.  The Deli sandwich was like Jazz in comparison.  A rough mound of very thinly sliced ham was covered in cheese and in some kind of amazing bread that I can’t quite remember.  That’s not to say that my home grilled ham and cheese was bad.  On the contrary.  My mom used to make a grilled ham and cheese cooked on an old peeling frying pan that probably contained equal parts burned butter and teflon.  It was so pressed down it was like an eraser.  Haven’t you ever wanted to bite down on an eraser just once and have it be a delicious flavor?  It starts out a little rubbery, then break the surface and it’s gooey and hot, tangy, sharp with sweetness and it fills you with a warmth, a warmth not due to the content of the sandwich, but with the content of the act of it having been made for you as a special treat.  The Deli version was this multiplied by a thousand.  Don’t you see?  My mom told me that the woman who worked at or owned The Deli thought I was such a cute little kid that she loved it when I came in there.  “They never give people that much ham.  She must really like you,” they would tell me.  I would stare ahead in disbelief looking just past the sandwich into a corner without tables or chairs or details.  In a life full of bullies and disappointed parents and sisters busy fighting or pitying you for attracting the negative attention of the parents, someone who loves you just because you are cute and you like their cooking, is magical.  Isn’t that some kind of purity that we all deserve?  Fuck.  What do I have to do to reproduce this sandwich?  Find someone, woo her, love her, get her to love me completely…no scratch all of that.  Go somewhere, meet someone who loves me “just because”, freak out, confirm the impossible through various successes and missteps, delight in the spring of serendipity, marry them, be with them and love them completely, and maybe, fuck I hope so, just maybe she will make me a fantastic grilled ham and cheese sandwich and that day I can stop looking forever for that little ingredient that was missing all along.

Recently, the town I live in held a small photo contest on facebook.  They asked local photographers to shoot “A Day in the Life of Evanston”.  I thought this could be a good idea if people participated.  So I put the date into my calendar and set myself up to take some shots.  During the week prior to the magic date, I thought of several ideas that would say, “Evanston,” but which would also showcase a certain time of day or be cool to look at.  I considered setting up a camera in the middle of the main street and doing a kind of photo mosaic, dividing the image into 12 strips and putting a different time of day in each strip.  This would take 12 hours plus editing.  Scratch that.  Then I considered shooting the Evanston lighthouse, but I thought that was too predictable.  Everyone is going to shoot that.  So I considered driving around and looking for something to document like a childbirth, a fire, a wedding, who knows.  Maybe I could spend the day in the Emergency Room of Evanston Hospital.

As the day went on, I figured no one would shoot the lighthouse after all because it’s too predictable!  It would also be a popular choice among the people running the contest because the lighthouse is the symbol of the town.  OK, cool.  So how to shoot the lighthouse so that it’s not the standard shot that was on the parking permits.  Oh, I know!  I’ll shoot it just after dark when the sky is cobalt blue but too dark to see as blue unless you do a time-lapse shot.  I had a few hours to kill so I watched The Bang Bang Club.  This is the story of four combat photographers who were capturing the fighting and effects of war in South Africa just before and after the fall of apartheid.  These were very violent times and two of the photographers in this club won Pulitzers for their photographs of the extreme violence and famine there.  But the movie also tells how each of these men were separately affected by the violence and their own role as documentarian in the face of what to do as a human being in a life or death situation.  It shows the personal struggle each of them encountered as thinking and feeling artists trying to inform the world visually as to what was going on.  My own career has not been focused on the exploitation of violence or combat but I’ve always flirted with that as an exciting and important move.  Once people start paying you for your images, what you photograph takes a front seat to “what makes money”.  I took a lot of documentary film production classes in college and I still remember the lessons well.  So I realize that the role of the documentarian isn’t an exclusive or transparent one.  Through the very act of observation, you change that which you study.  I also know, or think I know, what it means to be a modern photojournalist and unfortunately a lot of the important imagery is going underappreciated and flat ignored by the desensitization of the West (and the world).  We’ve frankly been so overexposed to ultraviolence that the prize-winning shots aren’t making a dent on most peoples’ psyche.  Do we continue to fight the good fight and show the world the reality behind war?  Do we stop covering it because people don’t care?  Are we simply making art at the expense of others?

After the movie was over, I threw my equipment into the back and got into the car about 10 or 15 minutes after sunset.  I started driving.  It was becoming a very dark night and the headlights of the other drivers were glaring into my eyes.  I figured I’d drive just past work, make a right and it would take me straight to the lighthouse.  But as I approached the dip that goes under the train bridge, there seemed to be an accident up ahead.  The cops blocked off the road in front of me.  Another cop blocked off the road behind me.  There were people running around the front of a stopped minivan just on my side of the intersection about four cars ahead.  As the police started to clear our cars from the intersection, I knew I’d be driving right past the accident.  I considered double parking and photographing whatever it was as this was my chance to cover something that was definitely happening on this “Day in the life of Evanston”.  The stars were aligning, so to speak, with me carrying quite a lot of camera equipment in the trunk and looking for something to shoot right then and there, I could see the shot ideas forming in my head.  The cops near the front of the minivan had blue-white flashlights which would light the scene beautifully and contrast with the orange sodium lights under the bridge.

From my driver’s seat, I could see that the accident wasn’t between two cars.  Rather someone was down on the ground, having been hit by the minivan.  This was more serious than I had thought.  I continued forward in the caravan as we left the intersection and I drove to within 10 feet of the body.  People weren’t running anymore.  No one was around her.  Her eyes were locked unblinking on the stars.  A splash of black blood had flowed from her mouth where it remained.  The rotating red and blue lights traced the outline of her body and her surprised face.  She was alone.

I drove to the lighthouse and completed my photo shoot.  I lay on the ground steadying my hands and arms against my face and chest, breathing slower to a standstill and clicking off the one and two second handheld shots.  Afterward, I watched the long beam of the lighthouse extend out and blend with the darkness of Lake Michigan. 

I thought any time you want to extend the human experience into a new and rewarding area, it is a risk however you do it. Some people join the coast guard to jump out of helicopters into the ocean at night so they can save lives and so that others can benefit from their experience, knowledge and training. It is the same whenever you take that leap from the status quo and try to find a great photo, a new job or love. My sister has been going through a divorce for the past four years. It is something that will scare anyone away from ever getting into a serious relationship. Often I’ve said to myself that it is better to just play it safe and stay alone. But loneliness is self-destructive and great joy can be found in the eyes and lips and soul of another. Unfortunately, that kind of reward only comes after really knowing someone and risking embarrassment and rejection. I guess all we can do is find someone you think you can trust and put your trust in that person. Will that seed grow into something wonderful and lifelong? No one knows. I suppose it is a decision made every day by both people in the relationship. Every day you decide that this is the person I want to be with. Hopefully those decisions are only difficult at a very small number of times like at the beginning, at vows, after a challenge, and every other day is a promise kept to each other and to yourself to be true to your ideals, to the teachings you were raised with, so that when you look up to your reflection you can smile with sunshine in your heart, sunshine that grows that seed of trust into a tree of life.

For some, life is short.  At the end, hopefully you have a view of the beautiful post-sunset star-speckeled sky so you can stop for your last moment and wonder what it was all about.

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Here are some of the photos from the event:

Today I photographed Taffy Apple Day in the cafeteria at work.  I have no deep thoughts about this.  It was simply a quick little shoot.  Nothing to report here.  On the other side of the cafeteria, they are trying to get coffee addicts to stop using 4 million Styrofoam cups a year across the hospital system (4 hospitals).  So they are offering that people instead purchase a branded coffee mug, like everyone has seen.  So I shot a photo of someone bringing theirs back to complain that the lid was cheap and broken.  See, the problem with trying to modify people’s habits against their will is that people are already looking for a reason not to comply.  Sure, everyone thinks Styrofoam is bad and no one likes using it.  But people like their little conveniences too, like not having to wash their own dishes.  Take it from me.  I eat out almost every meal.  Many people balk at that but the way I usually explain it is that I have dozens of personal chefs scattered around the north shore of Chicago.  Sure, I could save a little money and make my own food, but the effort involved is annoying.  First, I have to go to cooking school and graduate.  Then I have to get a liquor license and the proper health code permits.  Next is fire insurance because potentially burning down the apartment complex is not something I can handle financially at the moment.  Then I have to get containers to serve the food in.  Then I have to hire drivers to take the food, wait for my call and then bring the food back to me.  And that just seems silly.  Isn’t it just easier to work with the people who have done all of that work already?  I don’t even have table candles with tea lights.  Oh wait, I do have that.  OK, there’s that.  But all of the rest just seems insurmountable.

If you are too weak to walk, I’ll lift you on my shoulders. If you are too tired to laugh, I’ll sing you to sleep. If you are scared of your nightmares, I’ll conquor your demons. If you are hungry for contact, I’ll fill you with love. If your shoulders are shaking, my coat will fit you. If you’re longing for feedback, I was raised by a mom and two sisters. If you want to have fun at a car show, I can usually tell when my river of information has crested. If your knees are two wind-bent willows, I can be your oak. If you are too drunk to lay your head down anywhere except the toilet seat, I’ll still love and respect you in the morning. If you were hurt in the past, hey, so was I. If you want all of these things or none of them, I’ll understand. If you cry out at the injustice of the world, I’ll be your wailing wall. If you take up arms, I’ll be your muscle. If you make a big deal out of it all and beat my chest with your arms, I’ll take it with patience. This I can do for you because my love feeds off of your love like two wildfires taking back settled land. This I can do for you because I believe in something larger than what is in front of us at this moment. This I can do for us because we is the stronger form of you and me.

I have a song in my heart that I like to listen to. Maybe sometime I’ll whisper it to you from my lips to your lips and that song will sit in your heart as well.