D.C. In Pictures

Thursday, January 22, 2009

I have to confess that I only took 3 pictures on the actual day of the inauguration and haven't even transferred them to my computer yet. Being in a huge crowd made it hard to maneuver to get my big camera out of my bag, which when combined with feeling sick, wanting to keep my hands in my pockets next to my hand warmers, and the autofocus suddenly stop working on my lens, made me just decide to leave the picture taking up to Jess. I know, surprising huh. But that gives you an indication of how unwell I really was feeling. I will post some of her pictures for you once she has them on her Flickr account.

The following pictures are of our marathon sightseeing trek the day before the Inauguration. The night pictures were all taken without a tripod and I am amazed at how well I was able to keep still enough to get semi-ok shots without a ton of blurriness. I did perfect a brace of sorts using the brim of my hat, but I didn't realize until afterwards that it gave all my pictures a slight tilt to the right. I am normally very good about visually eyeballing straight lines, but the hat just threw me off so I had to correct the tilt when I was processing the pictures. It took a lot longer to go through the batch when I had to correct so many tilts! Click on any of the pictures for more.

Washington Monument
I have no idea why all of these ended up in black & white, but they did. I processed in batches and somehow ended up converting them all at separate times without realizing it.







Reflecting Pool
The pool was completely iced over and the barricade had been pushed from the side of it into the water. Part of it was on top of the ice and the other part had frozen underneath. The dude in the first picture was an absolute oddball who just stood there while we were taking pictures. I figured he looked enough like some uniformed important person to keep him in the shot.





Jess standing on the ice after a young punk decided to try it out and deemed it safe


Lincoln Memorial
Seeing this was by far the best part of the trip, except for the inauguration of course. As some of you know, when I pray God often gives me pictures or visions for me to pass on to the person I am praying for. Generally I don't get that many for myself, but a few years ago I was going through a really rough spot in life. During one particular prayer, God showed me a vision of myself running up to the Lincoln Memorial and being swept up into Lincoln's arms and just being held. God was saying that he was so much bigger than my problems and would be my shelter. He was showing me that he wants to hold me close if I would let him. That was a huge moment for me and to this day, I can still physically feel that hug from Lincoln/God. So to see the memorial in real life and be able to find the quiet with God in that place even when surrounded by hundreds of people was amazing. I will not soon forget that experience.





View of the National Mall from the Lincoln Memorial
You can see them dismantling the stage from the concert there in Obama's honor.



The Capitol
The first 3 pictures are from the backside, the final one from the front







Final set up for the Inauguration



Oh, and here's a view of my favorite thing about the trip...

(I hope you realize I was being sarcastic there)