Better late than never....

Here are a couple of images I took last Sunday and on the 4th. I stayed an extra day this week and took my 'weekend' a day later so I pretty much forgot about posting them here.
These first two are from the patriotic celebration one of the Baptist churches downtown held Sunday July 2. I will include the captions beneath them. (note: as always there may be errors in spelling in this version of the captions. I DO spellcheck when I turn the captions in to the copy desk before they go into the paper.)


A model of the Statue of Liberty took center stage at First Baptist Church Sunday evening for a patriotic celebration. The celebration included the choir, a barbershop quartet, an orchestra and members of the armed forces. Image © Odessa American


A mother holds her young boy as he waves a miniature flag during the Patriotic Celebration at First Baptist Church. The program honored those that have fought and died for our freedom as well as those who currently defend it. Image © Odessa American

Here I should add that I learned a lesson that should have been obvious to me: Don't use a photo if you don't know exactly who the people are or their relationship to one another. In the photo above, I don't know for a fact whether it is her son and I shouldn't have worded the caption so. I shouldn't have even used the photo at all. As Mark told, regardless of whether it is a good photo or not if you don't have the proper info don't use it. I could not get to them to get the info because they were in the center of the middle pew and had people packed in aroudn them. I wanted to wait, but I was already pushing my deadline for these photos and needed to get to a baseball game (that ended up not being used, ironically). I really liked this shot, and my infatuation with it blinded me to an obvious error on my part. Some lessons, even simple ones, are learned the hard way. This photo ran on the front page and earned me a scolding from both my editor and an email from the editor-in-chief. Needless to say, I am getting caption info now, no matter how hard it is to get to the subjects.

**I am currently having trouble with blogger so I will have to upload the last couple of photos later.**