No Boundaries

Pepper: The Official Photography Project Dog

It has been a miserable spring here in the mountains of Utah. Very similar to the Cubs season this year, the weather has reached 500 (the statistical midpoint between a good year and a bad one) numerous times only to collapse into an abhorrent free-fall requiring a good sense of humor.

This unfortunate spring has been made all the worse by the fact that my children were attending different high schools and their vacations did not coincide. So the photography project should evolve into an almost year-long thing in this instance. Hopefully anyway.  This year, in particular, I’m looking forward to my kids’ release from academia more so than are my kids.

Right now I’m fleshing out my new site with photography and illustration galleries that have been long promised but not delivered. Something more important invariably pops up. I’m giving it a good go now so I should be posting quite a bit of the imagery that has been laying about my desktop for a while.

These should include some studio food and spirits and portrait work (separate projects), Vancouver photography from last November, Saline Environments project work as it crops up, and some more resort HDRI.  That’s all I can think of at the moment, but there are probably more bunches of unprocessed photos in hiding here and there on the occasional hard-drive.

I’ll also be posting the periodic babble regarding the state of the digital world, films and so forth. So I should be hitting the blog a bit more than I have lately over the next month or so.

I’m switching over to a Cannon 7D as my main camera and am tempted to include a bit of video here and there as well.

The Saline Environments Project, thus far, has brought Kate and I out on four short trips. One to Stansbury Island and the Saltair area on the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake, two to Antelope Island (an island on the southeast side of the lake populated with, ironically, bison) and a very early Spring trip across the Utah West Desert on Route 80 to the Bonneville Salt Flats ( in the vicinity of Wendover Nevada), which were, at the time, covered with water. It is a pleasure doing a project that has so many pieces so close to home.

I vividly remember my first trip to Death Valley National Park about five or six years ago. It was intended as a three-day excursion from a longer trip in Las Vegas. We drove well into the night, camped and, on waking, took a short drive in the middle, lowest elevation parts of the park, only to realize that we had gone so far and had ended up in what is, essentially, the Great Salt Lake (hotter, drier version). We do intend to make it back there as part of this project, but largely as a matter of completeness. It is, after all, the capital of the terrestrial-brine world.

Continue reading

A working dog does the hollow.

For most of my life I have had a fondness for both exotic sports and dogs. So the annual Soldier Hollow Classic sheep dog trials located just a few towns away along the backside of the Wasatch Mountains has long been on my to-do list. As an event it is something of a hodgepodge. Dogs herd sheep as well as ducks. They jump into splash tanks. They do other things that I didn’t get around to seeing. All is accompanied by a avenue of food, art, and knickknack tents as is typical of most every American fair.

My purpose in coming was to photograph the main action: the “trials”, wherein border collies go about their business of getting the sheep to go places and do odd things as directed by the clicking, clucking and occasional spoken word of the shepherd. So the attached gallery, which can be reached by clicking the photograph above, is predominately images of either border collies or sheep or the two together. There are a few images from the splash tank part of the program here and there.

I expected to be enthralled by the photographic opportunities at the trials and less so by the competition. The reality proved to be the opposite. The photography was hampered by all of the dogs looking very similar to all of the other dogs (they are all border collies in the trials), and the sheep are all the same as the other sheep (although they possess nice texture).

The sport is very cool. It is a little like croquet but instead of wickets there are gates, instead of balls there are clots of sheep, and instead of a mallet there is the strange combination of the shepherd who stands at a post down at the bottom of the course and makes noises and the dog who does the herding. This is all very amazing because the noises were not entirely differentiable, or audible even, to me anyway, from around thirty meters away, but could be discerned and obeyed by the dogs over a distance approaching a third of a mile (I’m guessing).

Continue reading

The Teeny Bushtit

He was an elderly man.  Not extremely old, but getting up there.  He wore Bermuda shorts and an Hawaiian shirt.  These were subtly-colored and well-matched, so he wasn’t the boorish fashion catastrophe characteristic of southern climes in late winter or early spring.  He had a gentle demeanor and we had been talking for a long time, he and my daughter Kate and I. Then he suddenly lit up in a broad smile and said, “I’ll tell you something.”

The directions he gave were long and I have to admit that I had stopped listening, in the way that one listens to directions one cares about remembering, after about the fourth turn.  It involved many turns on the wide dirt roads that lace the desert mountains south of Tucson.  He eventually reached a place, a power plant or perhaps it was a sewage-treatment plant in his narrative and directed us into the parking lot where on the side opposite the entrance to the plant were three bushes.  At this point he was kneeling and drawing in the dirt with his finger.  The parking lot was a square.  Each of the bushes a much smaller circle.  “There”, he was stabbing at the central bush with his finger, “there, there … several rufous-capped warblers”.  The broad smile returned as he stood up.  My daughter said, “wow.”  I nodded in agreement.  Then, having had his bright moment, he said his goodbyes. We responded in kind and he walked away. Continue reading

Excuse my absence or perhaps tardiness is the better term.  Between a flurry of project work (mining related) and the project of infinite birds, I’ve been quite busy.  Ditties covering “The Cove” (an important Sundance doc which is due to be released soon) and the next edition the Bird Project 2009 (Arizona and California) will be posted with all appropriate haste.

The bird thing is getting a little out of hand.  My daughter Kate and I hit the highways in our relict VW campervan.  We did the intended loop through the birder’s paradise of southern Arizona (generally all places in and around Tucson to the south and east).  Then things went completely haywire and we found ourselves joining my wife and other daughter, Hope, doing the California coast from the Mexican border, literally, to as far north as Moss’ Landing (above Monterey).  This later part involved hotels which was a good thing. Hope, with my wife in tow, was visiting colleges while Kate and I continued pursuing the birds. Continue reading

A Feral Kitty from an Oregon Bird Refuge

It’s long been my idea of a good time to occasionally visit a bird refuge or two. I’ve never called myself a birder, for obvious reasons. But I find bird refuges or, for that matter, any location where the birds tend to hang out, to be pleasant places to spend a little time. I’m not at all sure why. It has more to do with an environment conducive to lots of birds rather than the actual birds, I think. But then again it isn’t much fun without the birds. Maybe it’s the photography that matters. I’m definitely not a birder.

My two daughters go to a school which is strong in science in general and the various arts. Kate is an aspiring biologist and has already begun developing a serious talent for photography. One of her courses this term requires identification of birds and verification with snap-shots. Being the parent who carts her around on this one is, for the foregoing reasons, somewhat up my alley. So we’ve decided to work together on the project. I’ll take away a few good images and she’ll learn the art of photographing birds while she’s identifying them.

Armed with two telephoto’s (a slow 500 and a super speedy 600) mounted on digital slr’s with a couple of doublers (which we rarely used) we’ve begun the process with two trips thus far. The first was to the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in northern Utah in December. That was lousy. The place was crawling with hunters and the birds were few and far away. The second was a three-day jaunt to Oregon and Washington. My elder daughter, Hope, is now checking out colleges. So the trip was a family affair with my wife and Hope visiting University of Puget Sound, University of Oregon and Oregon State, while Kate and I hit the bird spots. Feel free to check out Kate’s bird list (not quite there yet) which also provides a summary of the locations visited and when they were visited.

I’ve grouped all of our better shots together, made a quick stab at processing them in Photoshop, trimmed the thousand down to a mere two-hundred-and-fifty, and posted them in my gallery space. I’ve thrown in a few seals and squirrels and what-nots, including the feline version of Jimi Hendrix presented above. It was a telephoto trip after all. The few medium-focal-length landscape and people images I took are to be added to that gallery at some point in the medium future.

– click image for more —