Roadside Memorial #1

Part of an upcoming series of spontaneous memorials and roadside memorials. We'll see how many of these I pull together. The plan is to spin these off into their own website. Details to follow.

Approaching Great Basin National Park (or the Great Rift Valley)

A very isolated place.

Spring Photo Roundup

Some photos from around Salt Lake City and City Creek Canyon, during a wet spring.

Zion Canyon, across from Angels Landing

Looking into the Narrows (Zion Canyon)

Morning Breaking over Zion Canyon

Morning breaks over Zion National Park, looking north into Zion Canyon.It's been a while since I have posted any new images; February in Salt Lake City tends to be dreary and unbecoming for taking photos. We did get the chance to take a long weekend trip to Zion National Park, still a little early in the year for anything to be blooming, but a very pleasant trip nonetheless.

Foothill Cultural District website

A new website for Foothill Cultural District. It seems that building websites takes up most of my time, leaving little for photography or anything else. Oh well.

Utah Trails Website

A new website for the Garfield County, Utah tourism bureau, featuring trails in the region around Bryce Canyon National Park, Escalante, Grand Staircase, and more. View the live site at www.utah-trails.com

Northeastern Utah Website

A new website for the Northeastern Utah Travel Region, designed by myself at The Go Travel Sites. To see the full site, visit www.dinoland.com.

Tilt-Shift Park City Downtown Panorama

A detail from a massive tilt-shift panorama of downtown Park City. The photo was taken in 2007 as part of a collection of aerial photography over Salt Lake City, the Wasatch mountains, and Park City. It works well for tilt-shift photography (created in Photoshop, as I have no tilt-shift lens). In tilt-shift photography, depth of field is kept in a very shallow slice through the scene. Additionally, the lens (and plane of focus) can be tilted away from parallel with the film plane. This effectively creates the illusion of miniature photography, as your brain has no real-life correlation with such distortion of depth of field over a large expanse (such as a city) but accepts it fully at the smaller scale. Real (non-photoshop) tilt-shift images also have additional shifts in perspective from tilting the lens away from the film plane, and is often used to shoot tall parallel things, like buildings, from the ground and still maintain the sense of the parallel. Below is the full image, zoom in and explore. Or download the image as jpeg here (2.85 MB).

Oyster Mushrooms on Tree

A beautiful set of oyster mushrooms growing out of an old stump, somewhere in a forgotten section of Salt Lake City.  Oyster mushrooms are edible, and considered tasty, although I will not personally be eating these.  I liked these images quite well; below I have included a slideshow of more photos of the oyster mushrooms.  Also, there are some slime-capped brown mushrooms that were sharing the space, although I have not identified them yet.  Any help would be appreciated.

Day of the Dead Altar and Montage

University Guesthouse website (WIP)

Recently completed, the new website for the University Guesthouse and Conference Center at the University of Utah. As with most these sites, I was responsible for all design and layout, media manipulation as necessary, and some of the underlying code (ColdFusion, javascript, etc.)

High Fashion

Fall Panorama Roundup

Fall is panorama time - ok, well, everyday is panorama day - so here are a couple recent big images. The top two are from a recent venture into the McCain/Palin stronghold of southeastern Idaho (on the opening day of deer hunting season, no less). Pictured is Bear Lake, complete with its abnormally blue-green waters, and a (190 megapixel) early morning outside the forest service cabin in Idaho where we stayed.




And just for old time sakes, a panorama at sunset overlooking Flaming Gorge in Utah, taken almost exactly one year ago at th

Heber Valley Website (WIP)

Here is a screenshot from the near completed website for Heber Valley, Utah. I handled the design elements, all the html / css work, and some of the underlying ColdFusion code. The full site, for what's it worth, can be seen at www.gohebervalley.com.

Comb Ridge Panorama - Southern Utah

From National Geographic: 

Geologically speaking, the Comb is a monocline—a single fold in the Earth's crust created by a cataclysmic slippage of deeply buried tectonic plates some 65 million years ago. That upheaval has left a scar slashing across the desert landscape of the Southwest: a sharp ridge of sandstone that stretches almost 120 miles (193 kilometers) unbroken from just east of Kayenta, Arizona, to some ten miles (sixteen kilometers) west of Blanding, Utah.

The scale of the Comb is not colossal: Its ridgeline looms only from 300 to 900 feet (91 to 274 meters) above the plains, and shallow washes surround it on either side. But what the crest lacks in height, it makes up in ruggedness. No smooth arête, the ridge swoops to sharp summits and dips to V-notch cols with relentless regularity. To hike the Comb is to run a gauntlet of up-and-down severities, always at an ankle-wrenching, sideways pitch. There is not a single mile of established trail in the Comb's reach, which is one reason why no humans, to our knowledge, have ever traversed its length. We thought we should be the first.

Read more about Comb Ridge, or see a photo gallery of the surround southern utah area, including Arch Canyon, Mule Canyon, and Valley of the Gods.

At The Sideshow (Utah State Fair)

Not featured in the sideshow, but present nonetheless: fanatic evangelic scrapbookers, a AK-47 carved out of wood, $16 lemonades with nary a lemon to be found, 9-5 pencil mouse pushers from Midvale thinking they have better lives than carnies, funnel cake, bulging dairy cow mammary veins, someone singing a capella at the Crest Toothpaste booth, all the booths by the main sponsor - an LDS apocalyptic (i.e. The Second Coming) preparedness organization - featuring food storage buckets, generators, and emergency scrapbook supplies to document it all.

If you survive it all (the fair, or the apocalypse), this is your reward: