Far Hills Community Church Vacation Bible School

Last week, I spent my evenings at Far Hills Community Church volunteering for the second year as the Vacation Bible School Photographer. This year, the theme was Armor of God and the format was switched to evenings to allow more parents to participate.


There were about 140 kids and the weather was perfect. Everyone had a fantastic time going from craft sessions, recreation (recess) activities and group activities with theatre and music. It was a blast watching the kids jump up, dance and sing to the music as they learned about the Armor of God as John Truthfinder threw down his Belt of Lies, Sword of Hatred and armor of Sin.

Classes were split between Preschoolers, Kindergarten to 2nd Grade and 3rd Grade to 5th Grade.

To close up the week, the parents came in to the Worship Center and the students received their last lesson, received their "Knighting" in service to God and celebrated with music and singing, closing with Stephen Fee's Broadcast.

During the week, the kids had a competition, boys versus girls, to see who could raise enough money for an orphanage in India that was visited earlier this year by a Far Hills Missionary team. It was inspirational to see the kids raising money for children they had never met to help them with food and shelter. In the end, the boys were announced the winners but it was a win for everyone!

Claudia Spradlin and the team of volunteers did a fantastic job and it was a blessing to be able to participate and see the joy and happiness of the children each day!

Caught in a Cattle Drive

Cowboy in Escalante, originally uploaded by BillyCrafton.

During our trip out to Utah, we headed out to Escalante and headed down the back roads to get Peekaboo Slot Canyon.

On the drive in, we saw a large dust cloud in front of us and discovered that we had a cattle drive coming down the road right at us.

I stopped the car and put it in park to keep from scaring the cattle and had enough time to grab my camera out of the camera bag. There were 3 cowboys and 1 or 2 cattle dogs driving the cattle to a different area to rotate them from eating an area down too much. In different areas, there were cattle crossings to keep the cows in their specific areas.



It certainly made an interesting experience as we had a cattle drive go around us!

Star Trails at Devil's Garden

Star Trails at Devil's Garden, originally uploaded by BillyCrafton.

One of the plans for visiting Devil's Garden was to try our hand at Star Trails thanks to a website Terry Watson discovered.

Using a photoshop action located here: http://www.schursastrophotography.com/software/photoshop/startrails.html

You run a batch operation on the folder that holds the star trail images and it opens them 1 at a time and combines the pictures.
It looks like it takes the first picture and uses that and then adds the stars before it flattens the layer.

In our test, we setup under the arch at Devil's Garden and I played with Manual Exposure until I got the results that I wanted, using a 30s exposure. From there, I locked my remote release to force the camera to fire every 30s or so. I shot at ISO 200 and used my Sigma 10-20mm lens since I didn't need a fast f/2.8 lens for this shot.

While we were taking the shots, we were frequently buzzed by bats as the insects came out. We also had a 1/2 moon that caused the sky to stay lighter than we initially wanted but it added tot he light on the arch.

I only shot 15-17 min as I wanted to do some light painting with flashlights in a few other areas as well.

One nice aspect of this Star Trail is that the upper left star wasn't moving and it makes for a nice circular pattern for the stars.