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!

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!

No, I am not “Sick and Tired” in the sense that I don’t like what I am doing, I am actually sick with a little head cold and very tired.  I am thankful that tomorrow is Sunday and that means we get to sleep in and have a pretty relaxing day.  I do have to say though, I would rather be sick now, at the beginning of the summer rather than in the middle like last summer.  I am sure that once I kick the “camp crud” that everyone gets at some point each summer, I will be fine.  I am sure that it is just the adjustment to the schedule and demands that wear on you here and I know that I will bounce back strong.

One of our little games has begun for the summer.  Being part of the IA/FA media services team or “Geek Squad” (we even have t-shirts) means that you get to play fun photo games.  Rich (the staff photographer) and I are often on the lookout for funny “bubble” pictures.  Last year we had quite a few and the games have begun anew this season with this photo:

Um, so yeah, that is me on the horse with Rich's thought bubble...

Yes, we love to make fun of eachother.  I just thought it would be fun to have a photo of me on a horse in my duster.  I wanted to have my hat as well, but rules are rules and CJ won’t have any photos of people not following the rules, so a helmet it was.  Funny thing was, that while I don’t really know much about riding, I have ridden before (though I don’t know if I have ever ridden English Saddle, or if that is even the correct term), but I think that I surprised CJ in that I knew something about what I was doing.  Of course in Rich’s eight years at camp he has yet to get on a horse so I won’t have any funny shots of him riding…

Beyond that, it is the second day of camp and we (Rich and I) are already running around like crazy.  I have racked up like 70 miles of driving for camp business, and most of that is just going back and forth the 2.2 miles between camps.  I made at least four trips today I think.  The problem is that both camps had big events that needed our services at the same time.  We have decided that we actually proved tonight that we are interchangeable.  Rich is supposed to be the photo guy and I am supposed to be the video guy, but we both can do both and did do both tonight because there was no way that we could both cover both events. (let’s seem how many time i can use “both” in one sentence)

For the most part the boys don’t really pay us any mind, but when either of us walk into the girls camp with a camera on, we are the most popular people in camp.  Every ten steps there is another gaggle of girls asking us to take their photo or to film something they made up.  Almost every girl in camp stops to say hi to us, it is quite amusing.  Some of them seem to think that I am a jungle gym, but there are worse things.  Needless to say, they run us ragged here and it is only day 2!  At least I can usually go to bed at a reasonable hour whereas Rich stays up sorting photos and uploading them for the parents to see.  If Rich misses a daily upload people call in asking about their kids and sometimes they even ask if Rich is OK.

My first video of the summer was shown this evening, but I don’t think that I can really share it on the tubes.  I am not sure that the people in it would appreciate that.  It was a fun project and the campers enjoyed it.  I will have other videos that I can share as the summer goes on.

Just another day in one of the best places to spend the summer.  Even if I am sick, tired and over-worked, it is still fun.  Don’t ask me how that can be, just know that it is!

I can’t believe that it is Friday again.  In reality I think that I have pretty much lost track of time since I came out to the east coast for the summer and especially since I came to camp.  I have been at camp for almost a week, it is crazy.  I can’t wait for the kids to arrive, and that isn’t until next week!  I did however, remember that I should post a photo today, though I don’t remember what it was that made me even think that it was Friday!

A little girl looks out at the water in La Rochelle, France

I captured this image in La Rochelle, France while I was working on the Ms. Prinsendam.  As I mentioned in my last post, people watching can be very fun and interesting.  This girl was with another young girl who I assumed was her sister, but there were no parents in sight.  I could pass up getting a few shots of her looking out from the ramparts (not sure if that is really the right term) at the ocean.

This images was touched up in Photoshop.  I added a watercolor filter effect to it to enhance the texture.  I would probably approach the image differently today than I did four years ago when I shot it.  It is an image that I come back to often, so maybe I will revisit it and see if I can make it any better than it is.  I have used in cards before and people have told me that, out of all the cards that I made, this was one of the favorites.  I probably need to make some more!

As always, comments, questions, and critique are always welcome!