The Mission photo thread

Post by **_Imwashingmypirate** » Sun Dec 09, 2007 5:26 pm

Gramps! You were actually quite handsome back in your day. : )

Post by **_Sethbag** » Sun Dec 09, 2007 5:34 pm

Here's me preaching in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. I am not the guy in the foreground, I'm the guy standing on the bench. Yeah, I actually stood on this bench and with a loud voice preached a sermon to all and sundry in Schaffhausen. I was all fired up by the old timey prophets from the scriptures, and wanted to be like them. ;-) I did that in Bern earlier in my mission as well.

The missionary in the foreground is Franz Etzel. He wasn't my companion at the time this photo was taken, but had been my comp in my previous area a few months before. When I was his comp he had a foldout picture from a body-building magazine of a guy, on the wall. You might think that was really gay, except the picture was him, as he won some kind of German junior body-building championship before he went on a mission. The picture of him at his body-building prime looked like freaking Arnold Schwarzenegger. It'd been a couple of years without touching the weights at all, by the time I was his companion on a mission, and yet he was still very buff. I'm glad we never got into a fight.

When Franz Etzel's mom was going to move from Germany to the United States, with Franz himself planning on returning to Germany after his mission, he got permission from the MP to have his mom come visit us and take us to the Swiss temple outside of Bern and do a couple of sessions. That was about halfway through my mission, give or take a month or two. So my last time doing the pre-1990 temple endowment was in German (I got home in July 1990, after the change). They closed down the Swiss temple for renovation sometime after that and everyone else who came out in my group missed their end-of-mission temple trip (a tradition in the mission) because of it.

Post by **_Sethbag** » Sun Dec 09, 2007 5:47 pm

Hey Gramps, I hope you don't mind that I took the liberty of adjusting your photo. I tweaked the color balance and added a twinge of local contrast and sharpness.

edit: I just retouched the airport one a bit too

Post by **_Imwashingmypirate** » Sun Dec 09, 2007 5:58 pm

I am sure it says somewhere in the scriptures that it is wrong to preach like that. But standing on the bench is cool. It's the sorta thing I'd do. Only not preaching. The other day a dude in my class stood up in front of the class to tell everyone about the carol singing tonight and he started preaching. IN THE CHEMISTRY CLASS!!!! Jeez!.

PW

Post by **_KimberlyAnn** » Sun Dec 09, 2007 7:11 pm

I love the pics! What handsome boys you all were!

Gramps, the shot of you on the toilet is hilarious! And Pirate, he's STILL handsome! :)

Seth was a zealous missionary. Gee, I would have never guessed he was a passionate guy 'cause his posts are so darn tame. ;)

And Gaz, you left your mission boundaries? You're bound for apostasy!

Thanks for sharing, guys.

KA

Post by **_Imwashingmypirate** » Sun Dec 09, 2007 7:33 pm

KimberlyAnn wrote:I love the pics! What handsome boys you all were!

Gramps, the shot of you on the toilet is hilarious! And Pirate, he's STILL handsome! :)

Seth was a zealous missionary. Gee, I would have never guessed he was a passionate guy 'cause his posts are so darn tame. ;)

And Gaz, you left your mission boundaries? You're bound for apostasy!

Thanks for sharing, guys.

KA

LOL :)

Post by **_dartagnan** » Sun Dec 09, 2007 7:44 pm

Did you buy a special garment with a poop chute?

Post by **_gramps** » Sun Dec 09, 2007 7:47 pm

dartagnan wrote:Did you buy a special garment with a poop chute?

Is that question directed to gramps?

Seth, I don't mind that you doctored the photos. They look much better. Much appreciated!

Well, pirate, I sent you a pm with some other images that you may enjoy. I think you can see that I am still holding it together just fine, thank you. But, thanks for the compliments to pirate and Kimberly Ann. Kimberly Ann, check out my photobucket account. Lots more stuff up!

Yeah, gazelam, that was really me. We didn't have lots of time. We were always working and that is why I had to pass off my discussions on the toilet. LOL

Post by **_Gazelam** » Sun Dec 09, 2007 8:14 pm

Wow, that airport phot looks a thousand times better, way to go!

That street preaching photo is awesome. How many of you were there? I notice two billboards and a table of Book of Mormon's.

Switzerland looks amazing, I love the architecture. You must have had a great mission Seth.

Post by **_Sethbag** » Sun Dec 09, 2007 9:59 pm

Here's a couple of improved versions of Gaz's pics. I tried a couple of different pics that didn't work out too well. I'm not that great at Photoshop, and what I know how to do, or what I know how to figure out, requires that some information be in the photos that's not in some of them. What I mean is, there has to be some vestige of a normal skin tone, just skewed somehow in the color space. In the photo of Gramps on the throne, the skintones are basically wiped out and replaced with that pink color, and there wasn't much I could do with it. Maybe someone who knows Photoshop better could do it, but not me.

Gaz, yeah I liked my mission. I never baptised anyone, but certainly not for lack of trying. The Swiss simply weren't interested. I think my mission baptised 100-120 or so people per year, and the turnover rate was so high that the wards and branches simply never really seemed to actually grow over time.

Anyhow, here are the Gaz pics. Gazelam, on the 2nd picture in particular some hard choices had to be made. Given the low quality of the image to start with, I was able to remove some of the scanning noise in your suit, but at the cost of the little bit of dark suit detail that existed, and at the cost of some texture detail in the brick wall. But you weren't really looking at bricks in this photo, so I thought it was worth it. I also made quite a few bright specs due to dust or whatever disappear.