Category: Best of the Week

Assignment: Studying the Spring Runoff

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Hiking Through Arches

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Assignment: El Día Del Niño

Assignment: Groundbreaking

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Assignment: Temple Square

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Assignment: Easter Mass

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Assignment: Flood Warnings

Assignment: The effect of domestic violence on children

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Assignment: Greeted with hugs and tears, nearly 100 Utah National Guard members return home after a Middle East deployment

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Assignment: Planned Parenthood, ACLU announce federal lawsuit aimed at striking down Utah’s new 18-week abortion ban

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Assignment: go out and find something

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Masked Intruder

The Interrupters

Assignment: General Conference

Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square

Church Leadership

Assignment: ‘It was like the end of the world’: Shop owner recounts robbery suspect crashing truck into his South Salt Lake business and police shootout

Assignment: Karaoke

Katmandu

State Street, SLC

Assignment: Hotdogs

State Street, Orem

Assignment: Cindreia’s Mother

Level Crossing

Assignment: Auburn v New Mexico State, NCAA Tournament

Assignment: Spring Weather

Assignment: Utah Jazz v Phoenix Suns

We lost a true champion of our children this week. A friend who had made a difference in many lives, especially those of my two children. Heather we will never forget you and the kindness you freely gave.

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Assignment: Dreamscapes

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Assignment: Climate Change Walkout & Rally

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Tough week.

Some weeks are meant to be forgotten. Welcome to this one.

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Assignment: This cannabis patient is believed to be the first in Utah to face drug charges since the new state law was enacted. Prosecutors later dropped all counts.

I’m getting a lot of practice taking photos of people choking up at press conferences.

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This week on xxx xxx: wrong information, vague directions, unclear guidance. Nothing I didn’t already know, but I would have been better off playing it conservative instead of trying to outwit reality. None was serious but then when you work alone you overanalyze it over and over.

The rules I remind myself of: don’t trust or pass on any information unless you check it out, don’t settle for incomplete direction, and why did you xxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxx didn’t you just shoot from the public street?

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Assignment: Utah Jazz v Oklahoma City Thunder

Assignment: Utah Jazz v Milwaukee Bucks

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Assignment: Press Conference on Vapes

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Assignment: Planned Parenthood Rally

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Assignment: Utah Jazz v New Orleans Pelicans

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Thinking about how using the Leica has made my vision health more creative… Manual focus has been a good thing. Rephrase – Manual focus with the 21mm has been no problem at all. Manual focus with the 50/1.1 is challenging and I’m not using that lens enough to master the physical aspect of focusing on moving subjects.

The 35 Summicron hasn’t been seeing a lot of use, but focus-wise muscle memory is good. Not to where I was before, where I could dial in focus without looking, but not to a point that I’m missing moments.

The missing moments happens after I’ve focused, dialed in exposure, and am watching the scene ready to fire. The figure is in perfect pose, the dog’s head is distinctly looking left, or the drop of water on the icicle swells as it begins to fall. I trip the shutter and there’s a fatal pause as the moment passes, then the shutter clicks. The resulting shot is maybe 1/8th of a second late.

So the slow process of composing and focusing increases the creativity dramatically. But the fatal flaw of the slow operation results in FAIL. To be fair To put the blame where it belongs, it only happens with the Visoflex, which is needed for the 21 (and also the 50 at f1.1).

Too many words.

The rangefinder view is something I grew to love, but I’ve clearly moved on to great EVFs, which give me an exact version of the final image in the viewfinder. I set my EVFs to monochrome, which brings a crisp emphasis on line, shape, and pattern.

Tracking through the past five or so years of my work, or even further back, there is a pattern of rebelling against the equipment required by the job of a newspaper photographer available to a newspaper budget.

When we went with the Nikon D1H and its 1.5x crop sensor, I felt like I was staring at everything through a straw. In reaction, I began to expand the frame by shooting huge composite images made of dozens or even hundreds of frames.

Then it was the EOS 1-D Mark II and an array of lenses that weighed more than anything I’d ever carried around. The reaction to that was to move to a series of small cameras that were clunky and unnatural, though lightweight.

At this point, after nearly a year back with the Leica M, I’ve turned on the smaller, low quality cameras. I don’t use them anymore. And I’m being drawn toward glass of the highest quality.

Maybe there are two years left in my career. I ask myself, Why take a photo with anything but the finest lenses in the world?

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Assignment: Opiod Press Conference

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Looking back the week was weak photo-wise, bookended by a press conference and a February football game.

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Assignment: Stallions v Hotshots

UNPA Contest Results

Had a good showing in the UNPA contest this year. Seven awards…

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2nd Place, Photo Essay – FLDS Evictions

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2nd Place, Photographer of the Year

Peace to those who allowed me to document their lives in these photographs. I hope I was able to honor your joy, your sacrifice, your loss, whatever it was at the moment we stood together under the sun.

Ideas Projects

Been wondering what to do about UNPA – it’s time to put out a call for entries and yet we’re still waiting on some results from last year.

One morning this week I had an idea for one of my vacant domains, where instead of a contest I could have all the photographer friends send in their favorite photo or project they did in 2018 and make a beautiful site showcasing each photographer and their work. It could be a monthly update, grow and grow, on and on…

I got so psyched up about the idea that I was going to call a photo editor across the way and pitch the idea, to ensure that the photographers working for them could participate without any issues.

Within a couple of hours the mind slowed down and the idea was thrown on the stack of ideas that are going not to be done. I still love it, though. Fifteen years ago we could have done it.

All week I’ve planned to resign from UNPA. I have a draft email from last year ready to go. Nineteen years of volunteer work on that project is something to be proud of. Someone else can take up the reins.

Then again, the industry is so much diff than it was. The community connection… I’m not sensing it.

Then again.

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The week covered a lot of miles. More photos than text.

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Idiots at Work

You can laugh because no one gets hurt in a YouTube video.

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Assignment: Encircle LGBTQ center opens in SLC to combat youth suicide

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Assignment: Utah Jazz v San Antonio Spurs

Jazz won…

Write your own joke: To get a press media pass from the Utah Legislature you’re required to take Workplace Harassment and Abusive Conduct Prevention Training.

Someone tells me the training is supposed to stop lobbyists from going after the interns. Of course, the benevolence and lack of judgment toward others as taught in the training isn’t always apparent in Utah lawmakers’ proposed legislation.

Assignment: State of the State

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Ran into someone who used to be a XXXXXXX. There was no need to talk about details, we both know the math and how it probably works out on a chalkboard for the next two years.

Woke up in the night and thought over and over about the situation. Finally got bored with it and went back to the book I’m reading, On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin. No matter how bad your problems are, reading about Saddam hanging people over a fire until their legs slowly burned up…

Not really.

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Assignment: Utah v Oregon

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Waiting for the Governor to speak and a guy comes up, Is that a real Leica?

We go on to have a great conversation racing through the past forty years of photography – shooting sheet film, Hasselblads, photographing bombs exploding and missile engine tests with high speed cameras on the proving ground.

It’s the kind of thing that happens when you carry a Leica.

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Photographing birdwatchers. Is that a Leica?

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We lost Shawn this week. At 35. Just a boy. He had a loving family who gave him a fitting sendoff. I’ll always remember photographing him and Scott in a fountain thirty years ago.

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Assignment: Utah v Oregon State

Images > words this week.

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A few from a new ongoing series taken with the Leica and 21.

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Finished the week off by installing Pi-Hole. Everything looks so clean now. After two hours, 756 queries blocked, 23.9% of traffic. Brilliant.

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Assignment: Selection of New Salt Lake County Mayor

Posting the most interesting, not the most popular.

The Leica and 21mm continue to give me unique angles…

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Assignment: Mitt Romney meets with Weber County Commissioners

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Assignment: Women’s March

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Assignment: Vigil for fallen officer

Confession

For thirty years I kept things pure. Now I have done the unthinkable: I have mounted a non-Leica lens onto a Leica M. I will never speak of it again.

Yeah, we’ve all done horrible things but that was really bad.

I have a 21mm again. The distortion is nearly non-existent. I am blown away, as I expected to be.

Driving South

Assignment: Cedar High Redmen

The Long Drive Home

Day Off

After working all week and being out of town for three days there is finally a day to spend together. We’re together on the couch when the phone rings – Possible active shooter at a shopping mall. You need to go.

I’m trying to cup the phone so she doesn’t hear. That’s what you do these days, try to hide the news you’re hearing, seeing, and reading so that all the everything-awful doesn’t get to her.

The week began with the vigil for the fallen officer, where I stood next to his family and listened to their loss. And now I’m supposed to drive toward what could be a mass killing. I grab my kit and start the car. It’s only fifteen minutes away this time.

Assignment: Shooting at the mall

Luckily it wasn’t a massacre.