RHS JROTC Colour Guard during Star Spangled Banner @ Redlands Bowl for RHS 2001 Commencement

This is my first upload; just signed up, hope to get useful critiques to improve my photography. Thanks!

Color guard - honor guard shots are tough to make really interesting, in my experience. No flag = no context = no story, as a rule. But put the flag in, and there's usually all sorts of dead space, or little more than a snapshot of serious-looking guy(s) with flag(s). What to do?

 

You came very, very close to a great solution here -- with the reflection of the flag in the left-of-center (tall) kid's polished headgear. Perfecting the idea would mean framing much, much, much tighter and timing very carefully -- so what we would see is essentially an isolated portrait of the flag bearer with the flag reflection as a prominent, context-indicating feature in the photo.

Dick, your comments are much appreciated. I tried a tight crop but due to the film involved, it quickly became soft and grainy (also remember this was handheld 200mm at 1/60 in heavy crowd), so a little camera shake softness also made it unusable, so i'll live with the uncropped version :) regards,