San Diego Weekend

I spent the last weekend of February in San Diego floating around taking one of the Mentor workshops. I've taken a couple of these workshops before and I have enjoyed them a great deal. Not only can you learn from the professional photographers/mentors but the quality of photographers in the workshop provides for another body of collective knowledge to draw from. We had rain on the Friday and Sunday, but had a sunny day Saturday. We had five shoots in all, Balboa Park, sunset shoot from Catalina Island, a wildlife park on Saturday morning, surfers Saturday afternoon and the USS Midway on Sunday morning. I got some decent shots but had a minor personal snafu, when I deleted all the photos off my hard drive after I had returned home. A hard lesson but certainly one that will make me more careful about my workflow. I did have a couple that I had saved on Flickr which I have link to here.

Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam

I was at the grocery store the other night and picked up a copy of Arizona Highways magazine. This month the entire edition is dedicated to Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam. I have enjoyed this magazine for most of the 30 years that I have lived in Arizona, and have subscribed to it from time to time. The photography is remarkable almost too good from issue to issue. I also enjoy the "hike of the month" and "back road adventure" each month. My biggest compliant about Arizona Highways is the consistently poor writing in the magazine. The articles always seem so mundane and pedestrian. This month, however, there is an excellent article written by Larry Cheek a Seattle based journalist. who writes a very balanced article from the environmentalist point of view regarding Lake Powell. I would have linked to it but there is no online access to the article that I can find.

In any event, this month's issue reminded me of a trip that I had taken with my friends Tim and Joey during the New Year's of 2001. We hung out in Flagstaff for the celebrations and took a side trip to the Lake Powell area. I found some pictures from back then, not very good but fun to look at because they are starting to get to that age when photos become valuable even if the exposure wasn't just right. There is a picture of Tim standing on an overlook to Glen Canyon dam. There is also a photo of the Hamblin Moutain range which is on U.S. Route 89 just south of the Lake Powell area.

A Useful Website

This is just a quick acknowledgment to a website that I discovered a few months back that has been pretty helpful to me. I found the Yelp! website by running a Google search of course, but ever since I have found it I have been using it occasionally to find restaurants, bars and other interesting places to go in and around central Phoenix. Of course Yelp is not the first or biggest social networking site that allows users to review local attractions but it certainly has helped me find some nice places downtown. Of course it may depend on the reviewers that are taking part, so some locations may vary, but for my neighborhood it seems to point out the interesting independent and trendy spots. It seems to do a much better job than Citysearch, the local Newtimes, or local newspaper and is much more locally focused as compared to Trip Advisor, which is obviously geared towards travelers from out of town.

The latest place that I have found through Yelp was a restaurant/bar called Switch. The place is in an old bagel shop next to the legendary Durant's steak house on Central Avenue. I walked over there tonight to try it out after having lunch there the other day. After eating at Switch twice I would give it a solid 7 out of 10. I'll go a few more times and we'll see if it can be consistent. There is a bit of pretense about the place but they seem to keep it in check. For example, they serve classic comfort food such as chicken pot pie, but serve it in a pastry not at all like what I was expecting. The accompanying picture shows the exact presentation. It was good thought so I will quit complaining.

Why is it that so many of my blog post are about food? Anyway, if you haven't used Yelp you might give it a try to see if it will make good suggestions in your neighborhood.

Photoshoot with Devon

Devon, a model that I have worked with before was traveling through Phoenix and we had the opportunity to go out one afternoon and work on a photo shoot right before sunset. We went to the Rio Salado Habitat area that I mentioned in the previous post and I was happy at the decent variety of backdrop and locations that I was able to get. If you go to my flickr account you can see why I was frustrated with the "cloud" picture of her shown to the right, so I won't repeat it here. But, all in all, it was a fun time to be out shooting in the nice weather and with interesting backdrops.