Liberty Park Ferris Wheel

Vanitas #1

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.

Homebrew Still Life

It's been quite a while since I have last posted some photography, but here goes another attempt at making this a regular thing. I'm working on developing a still life, but I need to progress my lighting and composition skills before I get to the actual project. Here is a study using some homebrew supplies: grains, hops, a wort chiller, beer bottles, and the final product (a HB51 recipe at that). More to come (hopefully).

Zion Canyon, across from Angels Landing

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.

Liberty Park, the last day of fall colors

The pond at Liberty Park, looking northeast.  The last day of pure fall colors, after which trees started to loose their saturation.  As a bonus images:

Halloween 2008

It's pumpkin time! My pumpkin does not wear a mask, although he should. Not that he is terribly disfigured, or burned by acid or something like that. It's just they're terribly comfortable. My pumpkin thinks everyone will be wearing them in the future.

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.

Moon and Other Spheres

Something like a Christo installation.

The Night The Plants Attacked!

So I was just minding my own business, and the papas grass in the front yard attacked me. Luckily, it turns out not to be a green hand grenade, but this katydid. In many ways-even considering my sedentary lifestyle-the katydid does a better job of imitating a plant than I could.

Late Summer Dragonfly

The Odonata order comprises dragonflies and damselflies.  Dragonflies are well-regarded in Japanese culture - on par with Japan's and other cultures attitude towards butterflies.  In western cultures and in early United States, the dragonfly was understood to either sew your eyelids shut during sleep, or simply pluck your eyes out entirely.  There are no documented reports of anyone ever waking up to his or her eyelids sewn shut, but one must be ever vigilant.  These creatures of the "night" are only waiting for their chance, and then it's off with our eyeballs. 

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:

Montana Panorama

I have a feeling Springhill Ranch leaves their sprinklers on all day for dramatic effect. Not really needed, but a nice touch nonetheless. Overlooking Bozeman, Montana, the foothill of the Bridger Mountains can be seen to the left, with the Hyalite Mountains in the center, and the Spanish Peaks range in the distance on the right.

Hop Plant and Ripening Flowers

The hop vine, I have found, is fairly difficult to get established and sprout. When it does (as seen here in attempt number 4) it grows quickly during the heat of summer. Currently, the main shoot of the vine is roughly 18 feet tall, with a second main branch another 6 feet - amazing considering the hop dies back to nothing every winter. The cone shaped flowers grow on the top third of the vine, and will be used to flavor barley soup (aka beer).

Attempt at Something Hip (part x of np)

Where np is the set of all problems (complex or otherwise), here defined as the solution to a two dimensional vector, for which the solution can be verified in polynomial time (i.e. it is possible to determine the solution in the time given to us).

For Ann, Who Pointed Out The Scene

A Canadian Goose in Washington's Court, or Mr. Canada Goose [sic] to Washington
We've got the guns but they've got the numbers.

p.s. In late December, 1775, George Washington sent Major General Benedict Arnold (who would famously switch sides to the British - Traitor!) and Brigadier Richard Montgomery (who has just switched sides to the colonists - Hero!) to invade Quebec. This proved largely unsuccessful, although not for being a bad idea. The United States maintained at least through the 1960's detailed plans "just in case" we had to invade Canada. Upon declaration of peace after a successful U.S. rout of the mounties, the U.S. would annex Canada and territories and maintain the land and resources a la Puerto Rico. This was the plan for almost 200 years, and even then it was generally decided against.

Ann (1920's Edition)

A good method of wasting time is retouching photos. You can accomplish something, and yet when you are done, you really haven't "done" anything. In fact, you have taken something real and made it less real. This is not fighting entropy, my friends (spoken a la John McCain). Here, then, is Ann. She does fight entropy, even if her photo does not. She is seen here wearing a paper hat, which does not provide much protection against rain.

Ain't she a looker?