Sedona

Coming back from Page and my visit to Antelope Canyon, my friend Mia and I drove through Sedona. I have an off roading book called Backcountry Adventures Arizona that I bought a few years ago. One of the trips in the book is the Schnebly Hill Road, which is a easy trail that runs from Arizona 179 right off the Oak Creek bridge and winds through the mountains east of Sedona. The trail ends at exit 320 on I-17.

The trip takes about an hour and is a little bumpy at first but the views are great and it is not crowed when compared to Arizona Route 89A, the paved alternative. We shot a few photos along the way including one of Mia standing on Schnebly Hill Vista, which I have posted nearby. You can click on the photos to see larger version.

Antelope Canyon

I got the chance to visit Antelope Canyon on Thursday with my friend Mia. Mia lives in Seattle and for a long time has wanted to photograph these unique canyons in Northern Arizona. We booked a tour with Carol Bigthumb, a Navajo tour guide from the local area. Carol was a big help with transportation and she knew quite a bit about photography. Many times Carol got us in the right location for the best shot. We hired her for the entire day and went to a total of five of the canyons. She was called away for an emergency meeting with the tribal counsel so her son Lane took over during the afternoon. He was also an excellent guide and was an interesting person as well.

Because it is November the sun is much lower in the sky and therefore the "shaft of light" phenomenon does not occur as much as it does in the summer when the sun is higher and comes down through slots in the upper part of the canyon formation.

Taking these photos is much harder than I had thought. Because the way the light enters the area, there can be large differences in the light levels causing difficult blowout of either very bright areas of the photo or very dark areas. In the digital age this situation is called "clipping", I struggled with it all day.

Like many people, I tend to get compliacent about the place I live and don't explore enough. I had heard about the "slot canyons" many times but never made the effort to go see them. I was very happy that my friend motivated me to go see them.

My new website in development

Nearby is a mock up of the "About" page for a website that my friend Alex is putting together for me. I'm very excited to have a stand alone website that I can use as a central location to direct people to find me on the web. This blog will continue and will be part of several other locations on the web where I can be found that will be linked on the website, including Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I hope to have an expanded portfolio on the website along with video of many of the projects that I have been working on. The website should be up and running in the next few weeks once Alex and I have had time to sit down and sort out the final pieces to have it go live. I will, obviously, make an announcement here once it is up and running.

Uraguay

My friend Tim let me know about an article that was in the Real Estate section of The New York Times this week on Uruguay.

My fascination with this country started about ten years ago when, as I was working for a company that financed older aircraft, and I attended a few conferences that were put on by Bob Booth. Bob was born in Brazil, but raised in Uruguay and he was and is an endless promoter of Latin America, but particularly Uruguay. He would talk so enthusiastically of the beaches and great food, that I always wanted to visit. Last year while I was visiting Argentina, I went for a day trip to Colonia, which is directly across the Rio de la Plata from Buenos Aires. Colonia is far from the beaches off the east coast of Urugauy so no beachtown and surf for me, but I was impressed by how friendly the people were and how developed the country seemed to be. Both Argentina and Uruguay are known for their beef, so the food was very good and relatively inexpensive (at least at that time last year). The country also has a stable democratic government and demostrates a progresive streak by requiring all its citizens to vote under pentaty of a tax and by the outlawing of bull fighting early in the 20th century. (Nearby there is a photo of an abandoned bullring that I took during my daytrip.)

I think a trip to the east coast of Uruguay in on the agenda for 2009. With the dollar weak, Latin America is a much more reasonable place to travel these days. Perhaps I'll even find a new home there, well, you can always dream.

KiZake Shoot

I got a chance to go to a great little restaurant last weekend. My freind Chase invited me along to take some pictures of this new place. KiZake is located at 98 West Boston Street in the heart of a revitilizing downtown Chandler. The restaurant has a great vibe to it, which is supported by the terrific and really fresh sushi put together by the chef, Hiro Taniguchi. I highly recommend the spicy tacos, which is spicy tuna on a tortilla chip, served over a green salad. The owners, Ron and Maki are the type of independent business owners that do everything with quality and originality. It feels good to support these types of businesses in a city that is dominated by corporate franchises and strip malls. Ron and Maki also own 98 South and 56 East, two Eclectic American retaurants also located in Chandler. Now if they would only open somthing in Downtown Phoenix, I would be really excited.

Visual Storytelling Workshop

A few weeks ago, in early July, I went to the Santa Fe Workshops and attended a week long session with Bob Sacha on visual storytelling. Bob is an ex-National Geographic photographer who has moved on to a multmedia company called MediaStorm. He is also a terrific teacher. During the class we produced three multimedia stories using a slideshow software and an audio software. We had to learn to record and edit audio interviews, ambient sounds and action sounds to combine them with still photography to produce a coherent story.

For my final story of the three for the week, I interview a Santa Fe firefighter, Engineer R. Leroy Lopez , who told me the story of a baby that was born just a few minutes too soon, at least for him. I can't thank him and the Fire Department enough for the time he gave me as part of this project. I also want to thank Captain Greg Clayburn, of station #4 for allowing me to interact with his firefighters. The picture posted near by is one of the photos that I took during my time together and it is shown at the end of the slide show.

The slide show was called Elevator Baby and you can watch it by clicking on the link.

Using audio with my photographs is something that I have been interested in for quite a while. The audio brings a second sense to the experience and draws in more emotionally to the stories being told. As Bob mentioned in the class, we remember 30% of what we see, 50% of what we hear and 100% of what we feel.

More baby pics

My friend Denise recently had her first baby and I asked her to bring the little guy by so that we could get some photos of him. We got some quality pictures of the baby and it felt good to do something with my photography that will mean something for someone.