I’ve struggled to figure out to write this story. As I’ve told people it, I always end up choking up and starting to cry, tears of joy and emotion. Its just that, well, its hard to tell.

Friday, I saw God. I saw His hand working and moving and touching. I saw His voice speaking to hearts, including mine. I looked in the mirror and saw myself, inadequate, unprepared and unable and then I saw God, carrying me, preparing me and working through me.
I saw God’s people, I saw men crying and turning to God. I saw women weeping as they met God and surrendered. I saw young people sobbing as they realized the time they had wasted and taking God seriously. I saw a revival, a spontaneous work in entire families.

I was allowed to be a witness to spectacular events and was allowed to photograph God’s work. To capture the amazing things that happened here at this campus in Texas Friday. Just thinking about it now, the tears are flowing. God is SO GOOD!!! I can honestly say that I will not be the same after what I saw and experienced Friday. I cannot be the same.

Thursday night, I was pretty pumped. My CI story had come together well, and my instructor definitely liked it. I think it scored an A+ (although we don’t actually have any formal grades). Then they gave us our assignments. Mine was “Anointed.” I started to despair. That is so conceptual. Sure, its the theme of the conference, but how do I tell that story? What is the story, even? I wasn’t even sure I knew what Anointing was—I wasn’t really paying that close of attention during the conference. I came back to my dorm, whining to my buddies about the cruelty of the IPS instructors and how would I ever get this story? Oh, and it wasn’t just a story. The assignment was a 10-shot photo essay but output to a news story template with strict size and crop ratio restrictions and a lengthly article. All on a tight deadline that I had barely met the previous day without having to write an article.

I got up Friday morning still despairing. I realized this had to be a God thing, so I walked out to class praying, giving God my camera, my voice, my work, and crying out to Him to show me His story to tell. Now the funny thing about God’s work is that even though we still have to work. So I sat down to do my hour of pre-planning, and just started hitting brick walls. I went over to the convention center, bought Mr. Gothard’s recent book on anointing and skimmed it. I then spent time with Will, trying to get a handle on what I was doing. I decided to do my story on some mid-level staff member who was clearly anointed and doing good works of ministry service. As I was about to call Sarah P. to find out who that was, she called me.

“Sam, I just heard that God is doing some amazing things over at the library in the men’s session.”

This was just as it started dumping rain and storming majorly hard for about 45 minutes. She offered me her keys, so I grabbed my backpack of camera gear, jumped in her pastel green Bug and took off. Once I found a parking spot, I ran inside, deposited my backpack on a table, and grabbed my body and two lenses. I got upstairs, and it was amazing. My story should tell you what was happening, so I won’t explain it here, but suffice it to say that I was astounded at how gracious God was to me. My story was “Anointed” and a full-out anointing ceremony was going on. The lighting was gorgeous, the people’s faces were great and God put amazing things in front of my lens. I shot primarily with Will’s 70-200 f/2.8 VR, which is a sweet lens and one I will have to get. Anyway, I shot for a couple hours, then returned to the classroom and commenced downloading. I knew what I had gotten, and I knew I had my story now. I wrote out all ten captions and a story outline, then keyworded my images and sat down with Will to rate them. We were excited; I got some really cool shots!

Then it happened. Again.

One of the IBLP conference staff walked in the room and said, “An MGA [Mr. Gothard's Assistant] has requested a photographer over at the library west wing. They are doing anointings.” Will looked at me with this big grin and said, “Go for it!” And then he gave me a couple instructions, based on the photos taken so far (most of which were shot with the telephoto from about 10-15 feet away). He said, “Shoot wide and shoot close. Get in as close as you can, take the picture, then back out.” Right before I left, he said a short prayer asking God to silence my shutter sound and make my presence invisible. I grabbed my backpack, headed out the door, and started running over to the library. I walked in, pulled out my camera, and started shooting. What I was seeing was remarkable—indescribable, although I’ll give it a shot. Dads were bringing their whole families forward, and Mr. Gothard was praying blessings over young people and fathers and mothers. Mr. Gothard asked each person what they thought God had in their future and then each person prayed a prayer of surrender, confessing sins and personally committing themselves to God. Mr. Gothard prayed a prayer of blessing and so did each father. Then Miles Seaborn anointed each person with oil.

Tears were flowing. God was moving. He did a mighty work. Being in close, I heard the prayers: Fathers asking God to forgive their failings and make them better husbands and dads. Mothers confessing selfishness and recognizing that their strongest calling was raising God’s children. Young people grieving wasted years and surrendering to do be vessels for God’s service. As the rest of the room joined each blessing with their own silent prayer, the feeling of the weight of God’s anointing was electric. I don’t know how else to describe it. I knew I was in God’s presence, I knew that I was witnessing God’s work. You can’t be in God’s presence, seeing Him, without it changing your life. For me, I suddenly became aware of faults and sin and omissions. I confessed those, and as my subjects were surrendering to God, so was I. And I found myself praying, silently, privately, as I looked through the shutter. I found my eyes welling up with tears. My heart was full of joy—a joy that I knew comes only from God. A joy that is all-satisfying but also never-satisfying. I always come away from these encounters with God wanting more God. I guess that is a drive for heaven. But while it is there, it is intense and it is soul-filling and heart-rending and shakes you to the bone. God is there, and He is not silent.

After a few lens changes and swaps, I ended up shooting the event mostly with Laura’s 17-55mm f/2.8 and Will’s 70-200mm f/2.8 VR. I can see God’s hand in letting me shoot with these two very nice pro lenses. After what was probably an hour, I decided to focus my shooting a little more. Instead of jumping in, finding the shot, and click, click, clicking on the shutter, I sat back, figured out the optimal shot, then went in. David Waller, the MGA at the scene, mentioned that they needed these sort of images for some of their books. He had actually talked to me a few days earlier about needing images that they couldn’t find in stock photography sources. So in addition to shooting my story, I began looking for illustration images.

After two and a half hours of shooting, I went back to the classroom rejoicing in God’s exceeding greatness to me. I downloaded my images, and then Mandy stepped in where Will left off to rate the 1031 total photos from the day. I was excited to see that more than 1 out of every 3 frames were 5 star images. This was a testimony to the emotional impact God put in front of my camera.

Of course, at this point I had to put together a story. Having several hundred 5-star images to choose from was nice, but it also made the image selection process take far longer than I had wanted. With the finished stories due at 7p, I didn’t have a finished set of 10 captioned images until 6p. The templates were in Word, which is horrible for page layout, so I received permission to do mine in InDesign, as long as it followed the template exactly. I spent about 30 minutes putting together the InDesign document and dropping my photos in. With 30 minutes to go, I began feverishly writing my story. Fortunately, Will came along and granted us a deadline extension to 8p. I was able to finish up my story, a couple rounds of edits and get it output to PDF by 8p.

God was good to me.

My assignment story, in PDF format is: Anointed Article.pdf

Got up a tad late this morning, got out to the classroom, and received my assignment: The Children’s Institute. The assignment was expanded from yesterday: a 10-shot photo essay, with captions, reporting on a series of events. Due by 7p. We were required to spend at least a full hour doing preplanning, which I definitely chafed at. I was itching to get out and shoot! The discipline of pre-planning is valuable and out of all I’ve learned this week is perhaps the most impacting on my approach to shooting an event.

During my pre-planning, I began formulating a story and came up with a shot list and some objectives. I then spent two hours shoot 1,435 photos of the CI. Will let me use his 70-200 f/2.8G VR lens, which was awesome. The lens is HEAVY, but the quality of the images is amazing. I shot out my shot list, then spent the afternoon keywording all of the photos, watching while Will rated every single one (I have to applaud his patience in that) and trying to assemble my story.

At this point I was stymied; the shots I was aiming for at the beginning of the day just weren’t as cool as I thought they would be. My story didn’t flow, it wasn’t tight and cohesive. I continued playing with it, and eventually got 12 images I thought would work. I began typing in captions, and then figured out which two images I could pull. Finally, I took my ten captions, copied them into a Word doc, and began editing them as if they were paragraphs in a story (which in a sense they were; each one represented a photo and they each related to each other). Pasting these edited captions back into Lightroom, I felt that I had a cohesive essay. God was good; I honestly didn’t see it coming together in the amazing way it did.

Last night, we received our assignments for today. My assignment topic was “Fathers”, and the assignment was:

• 5 shot essay
• All images keyworded,
• Rated (by an instructor),
• and captioned.
• Due by 1:15pm

I got started early this morning with a personal pre-planning session. As I contemplated what kind of story I could tell about the fathers here, I was reminded of how God is my own Heavenly Father. I was reminded of how God provides for my needs. I was reminded of how God is my confidant; He cares about me, about what I’m doing and how I’m feeling. I decided to focus my efforts on showing this dimension of fatherhood. The idea of a “father” really directly relates to a relationship (father-son or father-daughter) and the ideal way to show this photographically is with interaction. I decided to structure my photo essay by seeking this relationship and this interaction.

Arriving at 7:00am Father’s Session, I listened to Mr. Gothard and began feeling a bit of the direction my story would take. Hearing his heart for the conference and sensing the response in the men present, I began mentally formulating my “shot list” and set about to get those shots.

The lighting and everything in the session were amazing. I loved it. After downloading those images, I then went out to get more images of fathers and their children. I ended up going out one more time to get a very specific image: the last image in this essay.

Sorting and keywording these images took the remainder of the morning and I finished the essay in the early afternoon.

This assignment was beneficial to me because it forced me to think about a story: I didn’t have an obvious story handed to me (like yesterday’s Cadet Squad Leader Training). I knew the pieces: I have a handle on the technical side of getting a good picture of a dad. What I was able to work on was finding the story, getting (and knowing to get!) the right shots, and assembling a cohesive photo essay.

Let me know what you think of this! I love to hear from y’all!

This morning, Will taught a workshop on storytelling with photography. Although yesterday’s sessions were wonderful, this class really got to the core of photojournalism: Telling stories. He actually started by giving us some “pieces” and then having each of us come up with and tell a story using those pieces. While challenging, this exercise helped us see how different pieces (our images) can come together to tell a cohesive story. The class concluded with us pre-planning our afternoon assignment images.

Mine was the ALERT Cadet Challenge Squad Leader training, which was already going on. A brief check with my contact confirmed that I needed to skip lunch in order to get the shots I wanted.

After a few hours of shooting and a few hours of workflow, (and a very exciting, dynamic opening session!) Mandy led us through a class on captioning. As Will said, “Pictures tend to have a lot of emotion, and captions help balance that out. Captions help direct that emotion.” We started by collectively rewriting a Dilbert strip. We then, as a class, created captions for a 5-shot photo essay Mandy had shot in Denver. Finally, we each went through and wrote captions for our photo essays.

Overall, the day was challenging but worthwhile. I feel that I am learning a lot of useful skills and also that I am being challenged photographically. Having the instructor review and rate EVERY single photo I take was unbelievably useful. Sure, I winced when I got 1s and 2s, but I also learned a lot about how to improve my images. And, out of 428 images, I did get 18 5-star images! (Incidentally, 16 of those were indoor, where I was forced to be closer to my subjects).

Having heard great reports from past students, I decided to take the IPS Photojournalism course this week at the Regional ATI conference here on campus.

Our first day covered the history of photojournalism (very cool) and the compositional tools available to us to tell stories. These tools are amazing. Absolutely amazing.

Like most IPS courses, we had to shoot for assignments. We were limited to 48 photos, no deletions (which was very challenging) and had to come back with 5 images illustrating the 5 concepts.

I ended up shooting two cohesive sets of images:

Ryan:

These images came out of about 45 minutes spent tagging along with Ryan and basically getting photos of him and what he was doing:

Aquatics:

I figured that the AQ unit might be doing something interesting, so I gave my buddy Dave (former roomie and current AQ unit leader) a call and learned that they were going on a dive. I was very interested in this, so I tagged along and picked up some cool shots.