Sometimes it is just plain fun to straight up document. As I was photographing the pow wow yesterday at Custaloga town I was interested in including the native part of the pow wow with their interest in paying respect on Memorial Day weekend. So I got down low and tried to include the American flag in the background to symbolize the weekend(the picture below ran in todays paper featuring a man wearing regalia and a head dress that is local- something that would have been worn by the Seneca). As the dancers went around the circle I snapped away concentrating and a half-dozen or so people. The problem was, at the end, getting names of them all as they all headed back to the camps in opposite directions. I knew I wanted the gentleman below because of the flag and it took me more than a half hour and help from many volunteers to find him. But I forgot to find the gentleman above who I never did get a very good photograph of with the flag. But his dress and face painting was interesting and i liked the simplicity of this shot. Straight documentation. The one thing 'photographically' I did to make the picture more interesting was shot it low to clean up the background. All of my shots from knee high and standing had very busy backgrounds of the pavilion and tents and campers in the background -- all of which were visually distracting. I really enjoy covering this event--not so much photographically because its--strangely enough--kinda difficult to get really nice pictures that tell stories, but because I always learn something. Mikes headdress below is called a gastoweh and everything - including the number of feathers is symbolic. Mike has 7 feathers to represent the 7 directions of prayer which includes the 4 directions, sky, and earth and inside the self. It is also a great place to meet very kind people including a man named Dan who comes here every year from Monterey to help announce the dancers and run the pow wow. A few years ago the Tribune did a story and Pete Chiodo came up with the description of the announcers as kind of 'primitive disc jockeys.' They got a kick out of it and actually had hats made up with the words on them