Fractions of Seconds

Marigold

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:25 -0600

It's Parade of Homes time again!
Twenty-five really nice, brand-new homes, most decorated with furniture bought at Boulevard Home Furnishings.
The paper does a write up on a half-dozen during the week of the parade.
They all kinda blend together after awhile but I really dug the interior decorating at #18, La Famiglia a Casa.
It was very much not Boulevard.
I wish more of the homes I shoot for the magazine for the "At Home With" features were decorated like this one. It makes it so much easier to get interesting shots of a house when the decor is interesting.
So thanks to Fringe Design and Krisen Brooksby for doing such a great job on La Famiglia a Casa!

Lazy Bones

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:18 -0600

The boys have been loving playing ice hockey.
I don't think I've ever seen Ethan working harder and with more intensity than he does at hockey practice. He gets off the ice and peels of his gear and he's literally soaked with sweat.
Max, on the other hand, gives a good effort for about 15 minutes and then we start to struggle with Mr. Lazybones.
He lays on the ice, just like this and waits for somebody to come pick him up because he's in the way of the other kids who are still playing.
It's cute, but it would be nice if we could get a little more effort out of him before he gets to the laying on the ice flat on his back stage.
But, the important thing is that they're having fun and so far it seems like they are. Even if it does show off the lazy streak my youngest has running through him.

Playing Along

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:03 -0600

This is Matt.
I spent a little while over at his house photographing him and playing hide and seek with him.
He had to have a little help from him mom getting around because he's got cerebral palsey but we had a blast running in circles around the couch.
This shot is him laughing after I'd "found" him on one of our trips around the couch.

All Nightmare Long

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 01:37 -0600

Another shot from the homeless series...
This is from the St. George Soup Kitchen's Christmas lunch at Grace Episcopal Church.
It was a bit of a nightmare to shoot this.
To start with, there were these floor to ceiling glass doors all along the south wall of the area where people were eating so there was sunlight streaming in through the window combined with the shadows that were about six stops darker than the sunlight.
The human eye does a much better job of adjusting to contrasting levels of light than does a camera. So while most people wouldn't notice the great deal of contrasting light present in the room, anybody with a camera would once they started trying to take pictures. You can either expose for the sunlight and the shadows will go totally dark, or you can expose for the shadows and the areas lit by the sun will be blown out.
On top of that they used these bright green table clothes so the sunlight reflecting off the green was bouncing up onto the faces of everybody sitting at the table.
You can see the green on grandpa's cap and shirt and in grandmother's hair.
I don't know how I managed to come away from this event with a picture, but I did get a few.
I just wish the girl were looking at the doll instead of kind of off to the side...

Cold as Ice

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 23:52 -0600

Six or seven years ago the advertising director at the paper brought me a hockey puck he'd gotten at a chamber of commerce luncheon.
The puck had a logo on it for the Dixie Igloo.
Mike England had talked at the chamber luncheon about his plans to build an ice rink in St. George and given everybody there a puck.
I was darn excited to hear about the project, couldn't wait to be able to play hockey again.
Without a rink here in town or for that matter any closer than Las Vegas, I just don't get the chance to play except for the two or three times a year when I make it up to Salt Lake to visit the in-laws.
Well, the pucks and the website were about the only thing that got done on the Dixie Igloo project until this winter.
They just haven;t been able to find the right place to put their permanent facility.
But this year they're doing a sort of feasability study by building a temporary rink inside a tent in a parking lot in downtown St. George.
They were supposed to have it up and running by the middle of November but one set back after another has meant that they're just now starting to lay down the ice.
But they are indeed laying down the ice.
And in fact, my fantastically cool brother-in-law who works for the E-Center hooked Mike up with nets to play hockey once said ice is finally frozen.
THANKS SHAUN!
I can't wait.

Homeless Joe

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:04 -0600

We're working on a series of stories that'll run over the Christmas holiday looking at the problem of homelessness in southern Utah.
Only problem with this series of stories is that we really don't really have a whole lot of the typical homeless type folks here in southern Utah.
I went driving around with a reporter looking for the homeless on Friday, we found one guy sitting on a piece of cardboard behind Staples.
His name was Bob, he didn't want me taking his picture and he didn't want to give us his last name.
I loved his hands though and he was writing on his piece of cardboard to "get some things straight in his head." So I asked him if I could just take a picture of his hands.
He was o.k. with that.
Still didn't get his last name though so the only place this picture will get published is probably right here on my blog.
I've still got a couple more chances to go hang with the homeless before the story runs next week. Hope I get something better.
I really wish we hadn't had this whole five day series sprung on us just last week so we could really spend some time on it and get to know some of these folks and get them comfortable with us and get them to let us really photograph them.

You Don't See Me

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:14 -0600

Since Chris Onstott left for the greener pastures of Oregon earlier this year, I've taken on the mantle of being the guy who does most of the video for the Spectrum's website.
Back in September, Brian Passey and I did a feature story on Jason Knowles, a young man from Enterprise who has some mental and physical challenges, but who wanted to contribute to his community. To that end, Knowles started collecting recyclables from his neighbors and taking them to the binnies down at the post office.
We went up and hung out with him while he did his rounds and produced a video to go with the story.
I got some good pictures and was really happy with how the video turned out.
I rigged up the video camera on the front of his golf cart to get some shots of him driving around town, Brian shot some video from the back of my pick-up truck as we drove beside him, and we came up with some different and interesting shots and I thought I put together a pretty solid piece.
The only problem was, the story ran in the paper on a Sunday, which means it also ran on the website on a Sunday.
Our website traffic drops like a stone on the weekends and this video that I still think is probably the best one I've put together this year, got very few hits.
I put up a video of a traffic accident on a weekday and people will click on it left and right.
A feel-good piece on the weekends.... not so much.
Anyway, let me know what you think.

Creepin Up The Back Stairs

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 23:51 -0600

Since I haven't blogged in a few months I went back a bit to grab a couple shots to make up for my absence.
This one's from my first basketball game of the 09-10 season.
Don't know why I've never climbed up into the rafters to shoot Dixie State before, but last month I hiked up there for the first time.
It's way cool, you get some very different looking shots but it feels sort of gimicky. Like you couldn't shoot from up there every game but just once or twice a season. If every shot in the paper week in and week out came from the rafters it would get old quick.
This one I really liked though and not just because it's a different angle, it's a pretty cool moment on top of that.
It's a little nerve wracking to be up on the catwalk 50 feet or so above the court and the autofocus wants to lock in on the floor instead of the players faces so it's a bit challenging to shoot from up there.
I kept worrying I was going to drop something out of my pockets or camera bag onto the players. I was double checking that I had everything secure just about every five minutes.

She's a Saint Not a Celebrity

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:58 -0600

They started the nativity festival in St. George a couple years ago.
I've had the great good fortune to get to go shoot it for at least the last three years.
Folks in town who own nativity collections from all around the world carved in different styles and from different materials bring them to the LDS stake center in Green Valley an show them off for a few days.
Some of them are really pretty neat but I've never seen anything there that would even come close to giving me the reaction that the girl in the middle is having.
But I'm glad she had it. It made for the best picture I've ever taken at the nativity festival.
To each their own, I suppose.
My favorite was the dinosaur nativity scene.
They had a section where they displayed nativities that had been made by kids and one of them was a scene that had little plastic dinosaurs arranged in the classic manger scene.
Mary and Joe were T-Rexes, the three wise-men were triceratops.

So Far From the Clyde

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:12 -0600

This was from the Pearl Harbor Day memorial service here in St. George this week.
Lee Warren, left, and Carl Allen are two of the dozen or so St. George residents who were serving in the military at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
These guys really are very special.
And not just because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I am sad that they continue to fade into history and I only hope that future generations will understand the sacrifice that Mr. Warren, Mr. Allen and the rest of their comrades in arms made to protect this nation in one of her darkest hours.