CWO (ret) Aubé also serves as the quartermaster for cadet corps #2719, which is affiliated to our regiment, serves a source of future recruits, and from whose ranks a few of the regiment's future commanding officers have come. The corps is commanded by 2/Lt Francois Bélec. In December, they celebrated their 50th anniversary with a mess dinner, and 3BAM took on the task of supporting the event. My job: shoot the group photo. They'd of course tried doing this sort of thing before themselves, but Cote- des-Neiges Armoury is a cavernous that's well-nigh impossible to properly light up at night with the little flashes on a point-and-shoot camera. My solution:bring along my trusty 1000 Watt/Second Dynalite power pack and a couple of flash heads, two reflective umbrellas and crank the ISO on my D800 up to 800 ISO. Voila! Plenty of light. In fact, as it turns out, I would have been fine at 400 ISO. The guest of honour at the event was the 2nd Field Regiment's honourary colonel, Colonel Charles de Kovachich, whom I've known since I joined the 2nd Field Regiment in 1982. There were supposed to be two gun shots that night, but owing to a burst pipe at home, 3BAM's artificer and tractor-driver, WO (ret) Gilles Pelletier was unable to attend and so the salute was as cancelled and 3BAM participation was limited to CWO (ret) Aubé, Piper Wolf Poll, and myself in my still unofficial capacity as photographer. The cadets still had a lot of fun though as did the guests at the table of honour. After the dinner, there were magic tricks, performed by one of the members of the parents committee, Mr, Louis Jutras . It as another long night and of the shoots I'd done so far for 3BAM, the one that required the most equipment on my part, shooting at times with my Dynalite pack-and-head system, at others with on-camera portable flash (yuck) and at others without any flash, the ISO cranked up to 3200 and the my lens wide open at f.2.8, and for many shots, a tripod. Good job I brought all this stuff.
Ubique!
Gary Menten
Photographer
