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Member’s Forum: – Get Ready For Aerial Fireworks Photography with John Krout
February 25, 2020 @ 7:30 pm - 10:00 pm
John Krout will be our February Member’s Forum presenter. His presentation is titled: Get Ready For Aerial Fireworks Photography. Come learn what you need to know in order to make great photos of aerial fireworks on the National Mall or anywhere else. You can try it first at the National Cherry Blossom Festival fireworks near the Wharf on the DC Waterfront.
John worked as a summer intern photographer for the National Park Service in 1974. His boss, Jack Rottier, was bored silly by July 4 aerial fireworks and taught John how to photograph fireworks so Jack could stay home on the 4th for once.
John has never gotten tired of fireworks photography. His 1985 photo of the Mall fireworks behind the Iwo Jima Memorial in Arlington won his first Grand Prize in the annual Arlington County Fair photo contest in 1992. His 2005 digital shot of the same subject won first prize in the Architecture class of the 2018 Association of Personal Computer User Groups photo contest.
John Krout is the son of a World War II aerial recon photographer. His dad purchased cameras for John starting at age 10 in 1963. In 1970, he used a Honeywell Pentax SLR for high school yearbook photography and was given a Pentax SLR as his high school graduation gift. In college, he became a rock concert photographer and reviewer for The Tech, the student newspaper at MIT. The newspaper issues including his work are now online.
In June 1972 at Dulles, he photographed the crash of an Air Force Thunderbird. Those pictures, distributed by AP and UPI, were shown all over the US on TV news that night and appeared on the front page of the Washington Post the next day with his byline. That was his first sale.
After a short career as an intellectual property lawyer and a long career as a software engineer, today he is a tech writer for a major maker of automated fingerprint identification hardware, supporting the US Department of Homeland Security.
John switched to Canon in 1999 for the Image Stabilization feature in many Canon lenses, which at the time was unique. He has been shooting digital SLRs since 2003 and today uses a Canon 6D for wide-angle and a Canon 7D for general and telephoto.
