As we near opening for our next show at the theatre I usually find myself with more free time, though I think that this time around my time will be taken up by getting ready for my honeymoon.  This mainly will involve cleaning the apartment and packing.  I am really looking forward to this trip.  It is the first real vacation that Ruth and I will be taking alone together.  It Should be really fun and I am sure it will feel like it was too short.

We also basically just got back from our trip to Disneyland with Ruth’s family.  That was a lot of fun, and it has been quite a while since I have been to Disney.  Ruth and I flew out and met the family there to spend outs first day at Knott’s Berry Farm.  Smaller than Disney with big rides, but also way bigger lines.  We stood in some pretty long lines to ride the rides.  We actually took to calculating how many people the rides could move in the amount of time we waited in line.  We actually waited around 3 hours for one roller coaster that was about a 20-second ride.

After Knott’s, we headed to Co Co Ichibanya (aka Co Co’s), a curry house that is starting to make a US presence, coming from Japan.  Co Co’s was the Jones’ favorite curry house in Okinawa, so they will go out of their way to go there when they can.  I don’t have anything to compare to, but it is darn good food!

Then it was on to Disneyland where we had two days in the parks including staying till about 1:45AM on New Years.  Disney is a lot of fun even when it is wall to wall people. It is the place where everyone has fun, and if you take a moment to plan your day, you don’t have to spend forever waiting in lines.  We managed to break the Pinocchio ride, as soon as we got in the car, bells started ringing and lights started flashing and they had to evacuate the ride.  Then the fog rolled in so thick you could barely see 100 feet in front of you.  We couldn’t see the New Years fireworks, but we did managed to get stuck in the crowd.  We got to fight against the press and then this great little old lady helped us jump the ropes when the cast members weren’t looking so we could get out of the crowd.  Good times were had by all.

Sunset lights up Balanced Rock at Arches National Park

Of course the other big thing is my photo gallery opening that was last week.  For the month of January I have a display of Utah Landscape photography up at the JCC here in Salt Lake.  It was very exciting to lay out all the prints and see them big and up on the wall.  I don’t have the space to really look at more than one at a time at home.  The opening reception seemed to go very well, there was a good turn out and I have since received a few emails asking about the images.  If you are in the SLC area you should stop by and see the prints, otherwise you can see the images on my website.

Ok folks, it has been quite the long stint since I last posted here.  Every blogger says it on a regular basis, but life has just been totally crazy.  My last post was in May, before I went to camp, before I got married, and before the current season at the theatre.  It was almost before the summer really started and now winter is starting.  I have been kind of bad about lots of things in the digital world of communication though.  I have been very slow at responding to emails, I have been behind on processing and sorting photos, and apparantly I am behind on getting videos together from the summer to go online.  Then there are the actual things that I havent been doing, like going to the gym.  Great.

So, will this just be a feeble attempt to try to get things moving on the blog again? I have no idea, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

So, if you got through that first paragraph and didn’t have a “wait, what?!” moment, you probably either already knew that I got married this summer, or you just missed that part.  Yes, since August 25 I have been happily married to Ruth and life is pretty good.  The wedding was beautiful, and everything seemd to go smoothly despite being out of the state at camp for the two months leading up to it.  We held the ceremony and reception at the Alta Lodge and we were happy to celebrate with friends and family.  Good times were definately had by all.  The weather was beautiful, the montains were beautiful, and the over atmosphere was great.  With a ceremony that we wrote ourselves, we were married by a mutual friend in one of the most beautiful places I can think of.  Don’t believe me? Here, see for yourself:

Here we are standing under the canopy that was built by Ruth's father, with our friend Warren officiating our wedding.

Working backwards in time from the wedding, the summer at camp was not one of the best.  Maybe that is why I refrained from writing during it.  I don’t know that I will say too much, though there is plenty to say about it.  The camps were under new ownership as of this past summer, and for some that transition was not so easy.  Suffice it to say, I saw some good friends mistreated in a very public manner and it got dragged out for the better part of the summer.  While I managed to spend the summer flying under the radar, there were grumblings about me as well.  Camp can be strange like that, it is just unfortunate and really hard when friends get hurt.

So let’s not dwell on the ugly past.  The theatre season is in full swing so life has been very busy.  Getting Annie up and open was a killer, but now there is a little room to breathe.  So in the mean time I have been prepping a bunch of my photos for my first ever gallery display!  I will be showing photos at the JCC in SLC for the month of January.  This is pretty darn exciting.  I have the prints on order and should get them soon and I am really excited to see them.  I am having all the prints done on metal with float mounts.  The test prints I had made earlier look amazing, it is a really cool finished product.  It would be hard to show what the prints look like in a photo, so any of you who find yourself in the Salt Lake area during January should stop by and see the gallery!

With that, I think that I need to stop staring at this computer screen. I have spent a lot of time in front of it in the past couple days. Besides being warm in bed sound much nicer!

There probably are not too many people who would say that they like stage moms.  All things considered, there probably aren’t too many people who really know what many stage moms are like.  Everyone knows a soccer mom, they are the subject of many stereotypes.  Stage moms are on a completely different level.  I mean, when you think that your kid is going to be the next big thing on Broadway or primetime TV it is really a whole different ballgame.  I think that stage moms are probably in the same world as skating moms (who think their kid is going to be the next Michelle Kwan.

I have been very lucky in my theatre career in that all of the shows that I have worked that had child actors the parents were not crazy.  However, unlike some people in this industry, I have a great appreciation for stage moms.  Why?  Well, as a photographer, working shows with kids equals guaranteed image sales.  One thing that parents can’t resist is photos of their kids in shows.

As I am not trying to make a living on my photography, everything I make is a bonus.  All in all, I don’t make tons of money on my photos, most people want one or two to stick on their website and that is about it.  So, when I shoot shows with kids, or kids shows, it works out pretty well.  I do my best to be fair and accommodating, and it seems that people are happy.  Hey, if one of these makes it big one day, and one of my photos is in their portfolio, that would be pretty cool.  To be able to say that I knew them when they were kids is a neat idea.

So, despite the stigma that might surround stage moms, I am very grateful for them!  Besides, we would never get new actors if there were not any stage moms, so I suppose they keep me employed!

I almost missed this one even though I was thinking about it last night.  That is what I get for thinking about it and not actually acting on it!  Stuff like that happens to me all the time!

This week’s photo is from a new set of experiments in IR photography.  I talked about how digital IR photo worked in a previous Foto Friday post.  Well, being back at camp for the summer means that I have access to an IR camera for the summer again, so I will be doing more experimenting!

The Home Acres Farm on Rt. 113 in Stow, ME (or close to Stow)

This image was captured a little before sunset during “golden hour” before going out moosing.  I inverted the red and blue channels to make the sky blue and get the cool IR effect in the trees.  The clouds came out pretty cool as well.  Shooting in IR is very interesting and I feel like it really opens up a completely different world of creative imaging.  It is so interesting to be able to visualize that which we can’t see!

I have a bunch more IR photos already and I plan to get them up on my website, IceWolf Photography, this weekend.  They are fun to look it in a bigger scale than this one.  I just need to sit down and do the upload.  I will let you know when that happens.

For now, enjoy this one, and as always, comments, questions, and critiques are always welcome!

I am sure that many of you thought that I would post some photo from camp for Foto Friday, but I don’t think that is going to happen.  At least not this week.  I have one image that I might consider, but I haven’t had the chance to actually work on it yet.  Also, we are not really supposed to post any photos with campers on the public internets, so odds are you won’t see anything like that from me.  I like my job, I want to keep it (even though every kid will go home and post all their photos on facebook).

So, for this week I thought that I would go back to the Moab Workshop.  I finally got some images from the final day of the workshop posted on my site so I thought that I would share them.  Besides, you really can’t go wrong with most of the images from that trip!  It is such beautiful country out there, I highly recommend that you put the Utah desert on your list of places to visit if you have never been there, especially if you are a photographer!

The potash evaporation ponds below Dead horse Point State Park in Moab, UT

This image was taken right around sunrise, looking out from Dead Horse Point State Park.  It is an HDR image and I just love the way the canyon textures came out.  I apologize for the watermark that runs through the image, but in this day and age where it is so easy to snag images off the nets I feel like it is a must-have (and yes I know there is a spelling error in it).  I don’t really know much of anything about the potash production or what it is used for, but the evaporation ponds are really pretty in the morning light.

An interesting point of note about Dead Horse Point State Park is that it is featured in the movie “Mission: Impossible II” in the opening scene where Tom Cruise is rock climbing.  I had never realized this until it happened to be on TV a couple weeks ago and I recognized some of the formations.  Just a little fun fact that most people probably don’t really care about!

In other photo related news, I hope to do some more experimenting in IR photography this summer.  We now have two IR cameras at camp, the photographer’s and one of the other staff member’s.  I am sure that both would let me borrow their cameras.  So, hopefully I will have some other fun images to share in that department!  With that said, as usual comments, questions and critique are always welcome!