Bryce Photo Workshop

Last week Heather and I met Wade and Karen in Bryce and Cedar Breaks Canyons for a 5 day Photo Workshop. This is a compliation of the pictures I took. I learned alot about my camera and some of my lenses and had a great time. This is kind of a long video so if you get bored with it I apologize, but I had a hard time choosing which pictures to use and which ones not to. Even though this video is 26 minutes long, I did manage to chop 12 minutes off of my original attempt. Next year I hope to go to Victoria to Butchart Gardens for Jim's Macro workshop as that is more the type of thing I love to photograph. After 5 days of taking pictures of rocks, rocks and more rocks I started looking for other things to take pictures of. In one place you will see a picutre of a leaf on a bush followed by what looks like a log and some kind of vine. This was taken using Wade's 400 mil. telephoto lens of the vine of that leaf and it was amazing to see how that lens made it look like a huge log or something. There are also some pictures with my Macro lens of the bark of a pine tree, that not having known that is was a tree, you might would still be guessing.

There were many amazing trees threre to photograph also. One of them looks like a man carrying a cat, another looked like a deer and another looked like a dog. Nature is truely amazing the the sunrises and sunsets were incredible! Even though it was a huge sacrifice for me to go to the sunrises it truely was worth it in the end.

Anyway, I hope this doesn't bore you all too much and that you can find some appreciation of the creations of our Heavenly Father in these pictures as I did in taking them.

Demolition Derby in Toolle, UT

This is a fun bunch of pictures I took at a demolition derby that I went to with Heather and her friend Amy and her family. Diane and I used to go to these all the time when we were young and I hadn't been to once since she and I went in High School. It was really fun to go again, and it made me think it would be fun to drive one of those cars and be able to legally plow into other people. One of my favorite rides at Lagoon was always the bumper cars and this would be the ULTIMATE bumper car ride of a life time. I think I must have missed my calling in life (ha ha).

Kinsley's Blessing Video

The wonderful face of a child!

Gotta Love This Face! Kris and Brent spent their first night here on their way to visit their Dad and Mom for a week. Saturday morning they got up early and went to the temple and the kids and I played games and I of course took the opportunity to take some pictures. Here are a few of my favorites. Hope you enjoy them.

Moody Family

My friend at work asked me to take some family pictures for her since her son just got home from his mission and her whole family would be together. This is my first attempt at doing family portraits so I thought I would put a few on the blog.

A Little Bit of Heaven

One Week Old

Life proves to be always changing especially the last month or so. For me, there have been some very good and very bad things going on and thus, I have not been in my usual routines and not been able keep up with the weekly photo challenges. But as for the good, Jessi had her new little girl (Kinsley) on July 1st and I had the pleasure of spending some one on one time with her and the baby in the hospital and got some pictures of her. There is nothing more precious than a new baby and she just happened to come at a time when I needed to feel the comfort of my Heavenly Father more than ever and she and the rest of my family were right there by my side for me to lean on. I am so very thankful to all of them. So here are a few pictures of the new blessed life straight from Heaven and a few of my favorite little photo subject "Tayla" who gave me my first kiss while at the hospital.

Black & White

When we got up to the condo they had this giant chess set outside and it was the perfect subject for this weeks challenge. I took a million different shots and it was hard to narrow it down to just one, but this is it. It was really a fun thing to shoot. I put a little bit of a red filter on this just because I liked the effect. Hope you enjoy it.

Park City

This week, Annette and I went up to our condo in Park City and Becky, Judd, Jessi & Paul came up on Sunday afternoon and we had dinner and enjoyed their company.



Monday night Sue, Randy, Jordan, Aaron and Angie came up and we played some games for Family Night. We had a good time and were glad they came up.



DARN, DAD WON THAT ONE!
Wednesday, Heather and Marial came up and spent the rest of the week. It was great fun to spend time with them again. We spent many nights just talking for hours. It was just like there hadn't been a long time since we had been together. We have known each other for some 29+ years. We decided we needed to make this an annual event.

Saturday, Leah and Angie came up with a couple of Leah's friends (Konnie and Kristen). We had a bbq and took pictures and got caught up on Leah's busy life. She is the Relief Society President in her Ward now and just bought a fancy new car. It was alot of fun to have them come up for a little while. We had a great week and enjoyed all the family and friends that shared it with us!

Red, White or Blue

Well, since we are up in Park City at the condo and the hot tubs were bubbling it seemed like the perfect thing for blue and white. We had Jessi and Paul and Becky & Judd up for dinner tonight and had a very nice time. Tomorrow, Sue and her Family should be coming up for Family Home evening. Wednesday, Marial comes from Oregon and then maybe Heather will join us for a couple of days. It should be a good week.

Bobbie's Ear

I was trying to figure out what to take a picture of for this weeks photo challenge and since Bobbie was sittling in my lap and my macro lens and flash already on my camera this is what I got.

Tulip Festival

Heather and I went to the Tulip Festival at Thanksgiving point yesterday and for the most part it was a big dissapointment. I was expecting huge fields of tulips everywhere, but only found tulips in flower beds along side of walking paths. I guess I had envisioned Holland or something when they had advertised it as a "Tulip Festival", but nonetheless, we took some pictures and here are a few of them. We probably would have found more tulips at temple square, but now we know.

Spring

I love spring when everything starts to bloom. Who knew that using the macro lens would make a simple leaf bud on a tree look like a flower bud. Amazing what details you can see when you have a little help from the camera.

Tribute to Elder James V. Baker

This video is of my nephew who is serving his mission in Hallifax, Canada. These are pictures taken by him or his family and compiled by me into this movie. I am so proud of him for having the desire to serve this mission. He made many personal sacrificies to do this and I have never seen anyone who wanted to do this more than he did. My favorite picture is of him in mid air in front of the Provo Temple. It is so typical of his fun loving way of living life to the fullest! Love you James, keep up the good work!

Video of Cute Tayla

Up Close - Old and New Hands

Tayla's and Grandma's hands - we spent the afternoon with Diane and Tayla yesterday and took some pictures of her after. She is getting to the point where she can almost sit up by herself, and she just laughs and giggles. She is so CUTE!

At Your Feet

This week, when we went down to Provo to see Jordan sing his solo and Choir Concert (which he did a terrific job on, by the way) I thought about Leah and Angie and their dancing feet. So we had them put their shoes on and I took some pictures. I had trouble picking just one so I did a collage of them.
Ever since I first bought Leah her first pair of tights and ballet skirt when she was all of three years old, she has been deeply involved in ballet and now teaches it with the help of Angie as her assistant. I think the feet of a ballerina are a beautiful thing and am glad I may have played a small part in helping Leah and subsequently Angie develop such a talent and love for this art.

Heather's Big Picture

Each week for a part time job I label 1,500 specimen bottles, putting my fingerprints on 78,000 bottles in a year. When you look at the BIG PICTURE over the span of few years I will have touched hundreds of thousands of lives in this small way.

The Big Picture

Sometimes, you just have to look at the BIG PICTURE when something like this happens before you do or say anything. There are sacrifices to be made in every decision we make in order to experience the joy that can come from them. So it is with these little critters . . . when I found that Doc had been outside chewing on the grass and then come in and deposited it on my couch I wasn't too happy about it, but then I thought, it was the perfect "Big Picture". If he didn't bring so much joy and love into the house otherwise this kind of thing would be much harder to put up with. I'm sure the same type of sacrifices are being made every day by parents with their children when they do something they shouldn't. But they are accepted and loved anyway, and we learn to go on and deal with bad when it comes and rejoice in the good, and so it is with just about everything in life.

Heather's Design Elements

This is Heather's first attempt to join the photo challenges. She is excited to join the group and will get her own blog one day soon.

Design Elements

This was a hard assignment for me to envision, but during the week I discovered a new TV channel that with programs about the lives of classical composers which I have been watching and it got me thinking that a bunch a simple little notes put together creates a whole visual, emotional and auditory design so I grabbed some sheet music one of my dolls and this is what I came up with. Hope you like it.

Light Challenge

In thinking about what to do for this challenge, I decided what would be better than the actual source of light it's self, so I took this with my macro lens to see what I would get. However, there are other more interesting examples of light below that I took several weeks ago at Jordan's Choir concert. I took these with no flash at all in very low light conditions, so check those three below out as well.