Category Archives: Boone FUMC

04-11-09

June 29, 2019 Christopher D. Bennett

In the folder called 04-11-09 is a photographic record of one of the least favorite things my church has done. They used to do this every Good Friday for several years. They would have 3 youths dress up and smear them with fake blood and mud and have them pretend to be crucified.

As you walked out of the church, in silence, after Good Friday Service, you would walk past a bizarre, macabre scene. Frequently music from THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST played softly in the background.

Don’t get me wrong, it was very powerful experience for many people in the congregation. But I always hated it. It always smacked of cheap theatrics to me. A Living Nativity is one thing. A Living Crucifixion, not digging it.

However, that isn’t to say I don’t know a great photo opportunity when I see it. In 2009, Logan was cast as Jesus. Here are some pictures:

By adding these pictures to the Photography 139 Gallery, I was able to restore the following historic “An Artist’s Notebook” entry to its original glory:

JESUS CHRIST POSE

Next Saturday’s walk down memory lane will probably involve the house, but it could also involve an electric car ride!

Boone FUMC, Candid Portrait, Event, Kio, Teresa

Bake the World a Better Place

June 13, 2019 Christopher D. Bennett 2 Comments

Today’s post is actually a mixture of the backlog and new pictures.

I never got around to posting pictures from the 2018 Methodist Men Pie Auction. Last Sunday we had the 2019 Methodist Men Pie Auction. The proceeds for both go to support the Youth Group Mission Trip. Between the two pie auctions raised over $3000.

The Methodist Men Pie Auction has been a smashing success every year it has happened and every year I’m nervous it is going to be a big time failure. Hopefully I’m never right.

Here are some pictures for you to enjoy:

The 2018 helpers from the Youth Group were MacKenzie Mosher and Anna Olson. The 2019 helpers were Megan Osborn and Hailey Bryant.

I think Teresa took the 2018 pictures. Chris Cromwell took the 2019 pictures.

Black & White, Boone FUMC, Candid Portrait, Jodie Cue, Macro, Photo Journal, WPC - Reminder

A Photo Journal – Page 21

May 31, 2019 Christopher D. Bennett 2 Comments

This week I knocked out Page 21 of THE PHOTO JOURNAL PROJECT. I took one of the rubber dinosaurs I seem to have in every room of the house.

Page 21 – Make something small look big.

While only one picture can be adhered into the physical THE PHOTO JOURNAL, however I took a couple other rubber dinosaur pictures that I like:

There are 20 pages left in the Photo Journal Project left to photograph. Gonna keep hammering away!

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This is your reminder that this week’s WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE theme is GROUP PORTRAIT:

GROUP PORTRAIT

Happy photo harvesting!

Andy, Angie, Boone FUMC, Candid Portrait, Carla, Drone, Holidays, Jodie Cue, Shannon, Steph, Still Life, Tamara, WPC - Submissions

WPC – WEEK 193 – BLUE

May 27, 2019 Christopher D. Bennett

First things first. Even though Photography 139 doesn’t take days off, it does acknowledge holidays. I hope you have had a wonderful Memorial Day Weekend, but also take the time to remember why it is you got a 3 day weekend. To honor the people who have died while serving in the United States Armed Forces.

Happy Memorial Day!

As is usual when a holiday falls on Monday, participation rates for THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE dip. While this happened again today, the people who did submit for BLUE were very passionate about BLUE.

There were pictures submitted that were taken in Rome, Philadelphia, Saylorville, and even Fraser!

But you didn’t come here to listen to me talk all tommyrot about participation rates. You came to see the submissions:

Andy Sharp

Carla Stensland

Kim Barker

Christopher D. Bennett

Kim Barker

Tamara Peterson

Angie DeWaard

Andy Sharp

Shannon Bardole-Foley

Stephanie Kim

But enough dwelling on the past. Time to look to the future. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future! This week’s theme:

GROUP PORTRAIT

GROUP PORTRAIT! What a great theme! But what is a GROUP PORTRAIT? A GROUP PORTRAIT is simply any portrait that features more than one person. It doesn’t have to be a formal posed portrait. A candid portrait works just as well.

I look forward to seeing your interpretations!

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HOUSEKEEPING

A MESSAGE FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHY 139 RULES DIVISION

The picture has to be taken the week of the theme. This isn’t a curate your pictures challenge. This is a get your butt off the couch (my personal experience) and put your camera in your hands challenge. Don’t send me a picture of you next to the Eiffel Tower, when I know you were in Iowa all week. I will point out that I have let that slide some in the past. I will not in the future. Since it is literally about the only rule.

Your submission needs to be emailed to bennett@photography139.com by 11 AM on the Monday of the challenge due date. It should be pointed out that this blog auto-publishes at 12:01 on Mondays. So it wouldn’t hurt to get your picture in earlier.

That is it, them’s the rules.

A MESSAGE FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHY 139 SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION DIVISION

Nobody showed class, taste, and sophistication this week by signing up for a Photography 139 email subscription. I’ll try and do better next week.

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That’s all I got for today, so if the good Lord’s willin’ and the creek don’t rise, we will commune right here again next Monday. Hopefully it will be a very grouped Monday.

Angie, Animals, Basketball, Bill, Boone FUMC, Drone, Frank, Geri, Iowa State, Jay, Mom, Naima, Nature, Night, Politics, Self-Portrait, Self-Portrait Project, Shannon

Selfie Project – March

April 24, 2019 Christopher D. Bennett

It has been awhile since we checked in with THE SELFIE PROJECT. I figured today was as good of a day as any to check out March before April is over.

I’m not sure I did more interesting things in March than I did in February or January where it felt like I never left the house. I think I’ve continued that in April. I actually even left the state in April!

Here are my favorites from March:

March 1

March 2

March 3

March 4

March 6

March 7

March 8

March 9

March 10

March 12

March 14

March 16

March 17

March 19

March 21

March 22

March 23

March 24

March 26

March 28

March 29

March 31

No doubt you already excited to see my April “adventures”.

Black & White, Boone FUMC, Formal Portrait, Movies, Nader, Night, Self-Portrait, Teresa

2009-01-05 & 2009-01-25

April 20, 2019 Christopher D. Bennett

There aren’t many pictures in the folders 2009-01-05 and 2009-01-25 so I decided to combine them into one post.

The pictures are mostly from a trip around Boone during a snowstorm and Nader and I’s last trip to the Varsity Theater.

Many people may not remember the Varsity. It was on Lincoln Way across the street from Lake Laverne. It showed foreign, independent, and arthouse movies. It still hasn’t been properly replaced. Now Ames have two multiplexes that devote almost all their screens to whatever mindless Marvel or Star Wars movie is being released that week.

Then if you want to see something original or thought provoking you have to take a ride down to Des Moines. Even Des Moines recently lost one its independent cinemas. Also, call The Varsity.

Here are some pictures to look at:

The sweet Iowa State scarf was a Christmas present from Teresa. She also took the pictures of Nader and I.

By adding these pictures to the Photography 139 Gallery I was able to restore the following historic “An Artist’s Notebook” entries to their original glory:

Denouement

Snowy Pictures

Sweet Christmas Present

By restoring these journal entries, I was able to finish completely restoring all the journal entries from January 2009.

Next Saturday’s walk down memory lane will involve a Boone fire.

Andy, Becca, Boone FUMC, Formal Portrait, Nature, Pastor Sarah, Photoshop, Shawn Karber, Travel, WPC - Reminder

A Photo Journal – Henry Carroll – Page 90

April 19, 2019 Christopher D. Bennett

A couple weekends back up I went to Minnesota to check out the Final Four festivities and check-in with a few people I hadn’t seen for a long time.

On Sunday morning I hit a donut shop with Becca and Shawn. Then I went to Minnehaha Falls to kill sometime before meeting Sarah, Shawn, and Addie at Revival. I figured that this trip was a great time to knock out Page 90 of THE PHOTO JOURNAL PROJECT. Even though it was absolutely just pouring down.

I made the walk to from the parking lot to Minnehaha Falls, protecting the camera as best as I could. I took a few pictures and then it really started pouring down. By the time I got to the car every inch of me was completely soaked.

I was so soaked that even after a 30 minute or so wait at Revival and about an hour eating and talking, my shirt only had a few dry spots on it.

Here is the picture that will be physically adhered to Page 90 of the physical PHOTO JOURNAL:

Page 90 – Create ambiguity with a blend of artificial and natural light

Pretty much every camera (even your cell phone) has white balance. This is where you set the kind of light that is dominant in your scene. It is set on Auto White Balance so that you don’t have to think about it. This is the type of thing that in the olden days you had to do with film. Film was balanced for different kinds of light. Pretty much all consumer film was balanced for daylight. Which is why when you took pictures inside, there was often a strange color cast to it.

The same thing happens when you take your color balance off of auto and set it for a type of light that isn’t in your picture. For example, in the picture of Minnehaha Falls, I set the white balance to tungsten. Since the lighting of this picture could be best described as shady, it the camera cast a blue hue on the image, thinking it was seeing tungsten light. Different kinds of lights have different color temperatures. You can make surreal images by setting your white balance against type.

One of the advantages of shooting in RAW is that you can change the white balance to whatever you want it to be. So I changed half the white balance from the image above to shady, so you can see what the image would have conventionally looked like:

Admittedly, I did play up the blue cast of the images a bit in post.

Here are a few other images I took at Minnehaha Falls:

I’m still on goal to knock out one page of the PHOTO JOURNAL PROJECT a week. This week I’m looking at knocking out one of these pages:

Page 97 – Photograph a human as though it were an animal.
Page 84 – Photograph a lie.
Page 43 – Take a picture that only works in Black & White.
Page 37 – Use aperture to capture melancholy

You could be featured in just such a picture.

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Reminder that the theme for this week’s WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE is RELIGION:

RELIGION

A RELIGION picture is any picture that involves the practice of a RELIGION. From a picture of a religious building, to a religious symbol, to a religious book, to a religious service.

Happy photo harvesting!

Andy, Angie, Animals, Boone FUMC, Carla, Formal Portrait, Jen, Jodie Cue, Kim, Logan, Micky, Naima, Photoshop, Tamara, WPC - Submissions

WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE – WEEK 187 – FAVORITE COLOR

April 15, 2019 Christopher D. Bennett 1 Comment

The weather last week was all over the place in Central Iowa. Beautiful one day. Windy enough to blow down one side of the Burger King garbage corral the next. Then beautiful again. Then a few snow flurries the next. Then beautiful again. While the weather was all over the place, it didn’t dampen participation rates for FAVORITE COLOR at all.

But you didn’t come here to listen to me talk all tommyrot about participation rates. You came to see the submissions:

Jodie Cue

Kim Barker

Jodie Cue

Logan Kahler

Micky Augustin

Tamara Peterson

Andy Sharp

Christopher D. Bennett

Andy Sharp

Carla Stensland

Jodie Cue

Angie DeWaard

RELIGION

RELIGION! What a great theme! I can feel what you’re thinking. I can feel it from here. I see through you. All the way to your back button. You are thinking that it sure is super convenient that RELIGION is the theme the same week as Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter and Passover for that matter.

You’re thinking that I rigged it so that RELIGION would be the theme the same week that all the chreasters will be going to church.

There are two things you need to know:

#1. I don’t use the term chreaster. I don’t look down on chreasters. They obviously feel there is at least some need in their life for church, otherwise they wouldn’t show up twice a year. If they are only coming twice a year, the church needs to do a better job of making them want to come the other 52 weeks of the year.

There is a story for why they only show up twice. It could be that they tried to get active in the church and had a bad experience with an overbearing volunteer supervisor. It might be that they sat in somebody else’s pew and were told to move. It can be that they were made to feel unwelcome because of the way they dressed, wore their hair, their personal hygiene, or whatever. Maybe the time they came, the reverend’s sermon made them feel like they weren’t rich enough to belong because he mocked people that buy suits from JC Penney.

Time would be better spent figuring out why some people only show up twice a year rather than pointing out that they don’t reach your gold standard for church attendance

I don’t know their story. I don’t judge their story. Everybody is walking their faith journey and I won’t judge people for where they are on it. I hope people won’t judge me for where I am on mine.

#2. Themes are assigned randomly. I have no control over it.

But, what is a RELIGION photo? A RELIGION photo is any photo that deals with RELIGION. It doesn’t have to be Christianity. It could be Islam. It could be Judaism. There are 12 major religions. Christianity is the largest with 2.04 billion followers. The smallest is Judaism which as 14.5 million followers. Which is a startling number when you recall that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

That is the 12 major religions. Overall there are over 4,300 religions practiced worldwide. That is a tremendous amount of RELIGION photo opportunities.

I look forward to seeing your interpretations!

HOUSEKEEPING

A MESSAGE FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHY 139 RULES DIVISION

That is it, them’s the rules.

A MESSAGE FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHY 139 SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION DIVISION

Jen Ensley-Gorshe is the latest person to show taste, class, and sophistication by signing up for a Photography 139 email subscription. Jen, in fact was the first person to sign up using the tools on the website to sign herself up. You may not have heard that this was a possibility because I haven’t actually made them public knowledge yet, so I was super impressed with her diligence. Jen is married to longtime subscriber Derrick Gorshe. They have 4 amazing kids and recently moved to a new house. I have known Jen since we were wage slaves to the Evil Clown Empire. Both of us are now fabulously wealthy and only show up for work because we want to.

If you see Jen out and about, feel free to give her a knowing glance and teach her the super-secret Photography 139 handshake.

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That’s all I got for today, so if the good Lord’s willin’ and the creek don’t rise, we will commune right here again next Monday. Hopefully it will be a very religious Monday.

Animals, Boone FUMC, Candid Portrait, Event, Naima, Teresa, WPC - Reminder

You Don’t Have Time to Scream!

March 22, 2019 Christopher D. Bennett

One of the new traditions that Pastor Doug brought with him to Boone First United Methodist Church is Critter Sunday. Critter Sunday is a Sunday when you are encouraged to bring your pet to church. Then in between services, Pastor Doug blesses your pet.

There are many things that I will miss when Pastor Doug leaves for his big fatty promotion in June, but Critter Sunday will be one of the things I miss the most. Top 5. Top 10 at the worst.

While it is certainly possible that the new Pastor will carry on the tradition, I don’t expect. Pastor Doug has a special place in his heart for animals. It would be a bit much to expect the new Pastor to be the same.

Here are some pictures from Critter Sunday:

I have to thank Summer for being Naima’s keeper while I was taking pictures of the other pets.

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This is your reminder that this week’s WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE is STILL LIFE:

STILL LIFE

A STILL LIFE photo is a photo of an inanimate object.

Happy Photo Harvesting!

Art, Black & White, Boone FUMC, Candid Portrait, Formal Portrait, Jaxon, Jodie Cue, Music, Still Life

Boone FUMC Church Directory: Chapter 5

March 14, 2019 Christopher D. Bennett 2 Comments

I think this is the final collection of pictures I took for the Boone First United Methodist Church Directory.

I think these pictures were taken on Graduation Sunday. However, that isn’t the reason for the red balloons. I just can’t remember the reason for the red balloons. Might have been the church’s birthday. That seems vaguely familiar.

I know at least a couple of these ended up in the Directory:

This process gave me some ideas for the next Directory. I might have to take a more active role in crafting it.