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 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!

The final day of the photography workshop that I have been at this week started dark and early at 0410 when our alarm went off.  Under the barely blueish pre-dawn light we made our way up to Dead Horse Point State Park to photograph the sunrise.  As I mentioned before, we photographers are a very rare breed.  Not only do we like to get up for things like sunrise, we like to do it multiple times in the same week.  If you think getting up before dawn and being out till after sunset is hard one day out of the week, try doing it twice!  I am quite happy though as these “golden hour” shoots are something that I really wanted to do at some point here in Moab, so being with people who also wanted to do that was great!

Dead Horse Point State Park is an incredible place.  My grandfather likes to describe it as a “mini Grand Canyon.”  When you see it, it is not too far from an accurate statement.  From the park you look out over a canyon carved by the Green River, though not as deep or as large as the Grand Canyon, the concept is similar.  Sunrise yielded some amazing colors and views.  It was also another time to experiment with shooting some HDR images.  I am still trying to figure out what I need in terms of shots for HDR and what all the options do when you composite them in the computer.  I have been able to turn out some interesting shots though.

This entire trip I have managed to find some precarious looking positions to shoot from.  Sometimes you have to do something crazy to get the shot.  This morning I was the first person to climb over the wall on the rim of of the park to set up for the sunrise shots.  I think I actually spent a lot of time on the other side of the wall.  I am told that my picking interesting places to plan myself led to a number of photos of me, though I have yet to see them.  However, I did think to whip out my little P&S camera that I have been carrying around all week to grab a photo of me on the edge.  It isn’t the best photo, so don’t look at it too big, but it will give you an idea.

This is me on the edge of the rim at Dead Horse Point State Park

After shooting for a while at the park we headed back into town for breakfast.  Certainly a welcome thing to do.  We got to the restaurant a little after 0800 which meant that we had already been up for at least four hours.  Needless to say, even though we were eating at Denny’s, breakfast was good.  We even almost had the whole group back together as the sickest member was finally feeling well enough to get out of the hotel.

From breakfast we went right over to Arches National Park again to walk through Devil’s Garden and over to Sand Dune Arch.  The big thing to see in Devil’s Garden is Landscape Arch.  Odds are, this will be one of the next arches to succumb to the relentless forces of gravity and erosion.  Back in the 1990′s (’91 I believe) a large section of the arch fell.  It is the widest known span in the park and it isn’t very thick.  I don’t think that I have ever been able to do justice to shooting Landscape Arch before, but I think that I may have got a couple good ones today.  It is a tough one to shoot because you can’t get that close to it, and it is really big.  Also, if you don’t have a generally upward shot, there isn’t much contrast between the arch and it’s surroundings.  You really need sky in the shot (or snow as I have seen in a few photos).

The last stop of the workshop (in terms of shooting locations) was Sand Dune Arch.  In my humble opinion, not the most exciting to photograph.  Of course today it was also complicated by high wind, tight spaces and too many people.  It was really hard to find a moment to get a clear shot with no people in it.  Couple that with the sand that was blowing around in the wind and the experience was just kinda blah.  It will be interesting to see if any of the images I got there are worth writing home about.  Having already played in the sand earlier at PIne Tree Arch, I think most of us were pretty ready to be done.

The workshop concluded with a wrap up classroom session back at the hotel before some people had to make their exit.  Overall, I was very happy with the workshop, I feel like I have learned a lot.  I learned how to really use my camera as the tool that it is and to interpret all the information and feedback it gives you.  I learned a lot of new ways to think about composition and ideas for how to continue to develop my “eye.”  Tuner was a great instructor, very knowledgeable and very helpful.  We also had a great group of photographers with insight from all areas of experience and everyone was willing and eager to share.  The biggest thing that I felt was lacking was sharing and critiquing our images.  I would have loved to get the group’s feedback to see if I was actually doing the things that we were talking about throughout the course.  In general though, a fun and educational experience.

Before really calling it quits from the workshop, most of us ended the week together at Buck’s.  Every trip to Moab should include a dinner at Buck’s.  On the outside it looks like it is just another road house, but inside it is actually a nice steakhouse.  We had a great time, exchanged business cards, and said our good-byes.  It is really wonderful how well we all bonded and how many members of the group offered their homes to anyone who wanted to come visit.  I don’t think that I could have asked for a better time.

With that, I shall leave you with one more photo.  This one is an HDR image from sunrise this morning.  A fisheye view looking out over the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park from Dead Horse Point State Park.  Hopefully no one reading this gets vertigo, and if you do, you have been warned.

Morning Needles ©2010 Alex Weisman

As always, comments and criticism are welcome.  I would love to hear from you.  I am sure that over the next week I will get through all of my images from the workshop and post them up at IceWolf Photography.

Today began at the ungodly hour of 4AM.  Photographers are a rare breed like that, we think that it is cool to get up BEFORE the ass-crack of dawn so that we can catch the best light of the day.  Sure, there are other people who get up or stay up for bizarre times (like astronomers), but we photographers think that not only do you have to be out when the sun comes up, but also when it goes back down!  Why take only one when you get two for free!?

By 0430 we were rolling down the road towards Canyonlands National Park.  Mesa Arch in the “Island in the Sky” district was the destination.  With headlamps and flashlights and packs full of camera gear we made our way to the arch in the twilight.  Amazingly, we were the fist people to arrive there, so we got prime pickings for spots to shoot from.  It was also a very ominous  start to a day that would turn out to be fantastic.  The only downside was that one of the members of our group had fallen ill due to food poisoning and didn’t feel well enough to make the hike.

We wrapped up shooting at the arch around 0730 after one of the best light shows you could ever hope for.  Only the photos will really describe it, and I have one for you a little later on.  Once we piled back into the cars and headed out to the Grand View Point.  From here you can look out into the two other districts of Canyonlands, “The Needles” district and “The Maze” District.  Both of those districts I have yet to visit, but the drive is a lot longer and they are a lot more wild.  probably a trip to be done with my brother at some point.

We got to breakfast (finally) at around 0945 and then off to the classroom for  some photo editing and some lecture time.  I was so tired it was hard to pay attention, but I did and I have the notes to prove it!  From there we had time for a much needed nap before we were to head out again for the evening shoot.

For the evening shoot we hiked up to Delicate Arch, the iconic symbol of both Arches National Park and the State of Utah.  We got up with plenty of time before we got to the golden hour so we shot some fun stuff like a jumping photo under the arch.  I managed to have a guy yell at me for being under the arch on account of the “dozen photographers waiting to take a picture without you [me] in it!”  The irony being that: A) This man was not of of those photographers, in fact he left almost immediately after the incident, and B) Nine of those photogs were in our group.  Whatever, I paid the same amount of taxes as anyone there and I have every right to take my time!  So, bite-me crazy-man-who-I-will-never-see-again!

After capturing some great sunset images we hiked back to the cars in the dwindling light with a family from Israel who realized the stayed a little too long and didn’t have flashlights.  They were good company on the walk, fun to talk to.  We hit up Zax for some pizza and beer and now it is basically bed time.  Tomorrow will be another long day.

With that, I suppose it is time for the photo of the day.  This is tough because there are so many great ones.  I haven’t even had time to got through them all.  So I picked this one because it was kind of the iconic shot for the day.  So here it is, Mesa Arch:

Mesa Arch at SunriseCanyonlands National Park©2010 Alex Weisman

As always, comments and critiques are welcome!  I will post more images over at IceWolf Photography as I get through them (I know I am way behind already!).