Early morning, little sleep...

So, after getting home at 3am, I got an email saying our original Sunday centerpiece had fallen through and I needed to be at the National Guard Armory at 7am to get photos for a story we were doing about the $40 million training center that was just approved to be built at nearby Dyess Air Force Base. On top of an obvious lack of sleep (I'm not a morning person anyway), I had no idea what would be going on, so it's not like I could show up late, I had to be there on time. To top it all off when I did get there and found the first two doors I tried to get in were locked, I get in there and the 1st Sgt. in charge had no idea I was coming! And, he seemed a little irked I was there and asked I wait in his office while he gave orders. Here I am thinking great, he's gonna tell me to leave or something. Luckily, someone else got the phone call about me coming and he wasn't as pissed at me when I finally talked to him, and he turned out to be pretty helpful. When we finally did get to talk, he said there wasn't a whole lot going on in the morning. This is something I hear all the time, I told him, luckily there was SOMETHING going on. First thing they were doing was PT tests, which turned out pretty nice since the sun was coming up at the time. That made for nice light and cool looking long shadows.

After the PT test Lt. Gilbert showed me over to the motorpool, where the guardsmen were doing preventitive maintainance on vehicles that had just come back from doing hurricane support from hurricanes Gustav and Ike. Again, I was able to make decent pix, but nothing that I was totally happy with. After talking to the guys in charge again they told me that later in the afternoon they'd be putting together a "sight line" for marksmenship training. That I was hoping would be the shot I was looking for, I gave my card to the Lt. and asked him to call my cell phone when he knew a time they'd be shooting. Well, he did... and they were doing it at the same time I had a soccer game to shoot. Normally, being in two places at once isn't easy, luckily have a good reporter help you out is a good thing. I went to the soccer game, shot the first 15mins. then went back to the guard armory, and got some nice shots of the soldiers shooting lasers at targets (top photo), the best part was when I called the reporter, he said the game was tied and was just about to go into overtime... which ended in a tie! What a boring game... at least I was happy with the gaurd photos, despite my three hours of sleep.