Hayden Peak in Spring

June 18, 2010

Hayden Peak is in the Uinta Mountains in northern Utah. The Uintas are one of the only east-to-west mountain ranges in the Western Hemisphere and is one of the largest primitive wilderness areas within the United States. We are lucky to have such beautiful country so close to home. We took a family trip up there today and schedules permitted me to hang around Hayden Peak for sunset. This is a shot I’ve had on my “to photograph” list for some time so I was happy for the chance. My first couple of compositions were not too pleasing but I settled with my third composition. All framed the peak with the pines as you see here but I tried different angles, finally settling on this one. I wish there had been more dramatic skies but you work with what you have, I guess. I do like the frozen lake toward the bottom of the frame, though. The blue water coming through the ice is pretty neat. Oh, and I had to break out the trusty hyperfocal distance table to get the focus just right.

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Black-Eyed Susan

June 16, 2010

I was digging through my old photos when I ran across a shot I took in 2005. I had completely forgotten about this photo and it really struck me as probably one of my strongest photos. I haven’t the foggiest idea why I let this one slip through the cracks but it happened. It goes to show you the importance of not deleting your photos (storage is really quite cheap) and the fact that your opinion of a photo can change over time. The photo was taken at the Memorial Grove Park in Salt Lake City, Utah. I had stopped by there to shoot flowers after returning from a photo trip up Little Cottonwood Canyon. The skies were overcast and I hadn’t really tried to shoot flowers before so I gave it a shot. I remember what struck me about these flowers was their bright yellow petals and the purple flowers providing ground cover underneath them.

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Peeking Sunflower

June 11, 2010

My wife loves photos of sunflowers so I had been looking for a sunflower as a subject for quite some time before I shot this. I haven’t shot flowers much, mainly because I haven’t been inspired by them as a subject, but I wanted to get at least one good sunflower photo. I had gone out looking for sunflowers specifically on many occasions but up to this point had not shot anything that I liked. My shots never seemed to have that “yes, that’s the one” type of quality so I kept looking. Well, one day my family had gone to a local farm to get pumpkins. As we were getting set to leave I noticed a sunflower patch and wandered over there. The sunflowers were huge and the leaves were nice and green (not the faded yellow of so many others I’d seen). Couple nice flowers with a bright, blue sky and I figured I had a decent opportunity for a pleasing photo. The only problem was that it was very windy so the flowers were swaying quite a bit. Nevertheless, I decided to give it a try. There wasn’t room to setup a tripod without trampling the farmer’s sunflowers so I had to [...]

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