A New (last) Light

I'd visited and photographed Monument Valley several times before I arrived at the famous tribal park at the tail end of my 2022 spring break road trip. But any concerns about redundancy vanished the morning after I arrived, as I awoke to six inches of snow on my car and a complete white-out of anything beyond twenty yards. After a few pensive morning hours I started to wonder if I would get any shots at all, but then the storm abated in the mid-afternoon to reveal the red rock landscape adorned in white. Even better, despite a heavy overcast layer of clouds that suggested a bland sunset, the sun darted through for a few precious minutes right before setting, leaving me and a dozen other photographers scrambling to capture the last precious light that capped Monument Valley's famous buttes with a brilliant red.

The Other Pillow Guy

At the end of a product shoot out at the Photopia Studios in June of 2022, Randy and I decided to make use of the decorative swing that stood out among the studio's various portrait accessories. I think there was a vague reference to a more famous pillow-pusher intended, but ultimately this image served as an amusing comment on what turned out to be a brief venture into the world of high-end Hungarian Bedding.

Electric Exaltation

Late one September evening my longtime friend and aspiring photographer Steve alerted me to an energetic electrical storm out over the Great Salt Lake. A half hour later, the two of us were in position on Bountiful Boulevard, hoping to get what for me would be my first good lightning images in almost ten years. The plan was just to look out over the valley at a safe distance and get images of Antelope Island, but the best shot of the evening lined up the nearby Bountiful Temple with an impressive bolt that seemed to wind down out of the sky around the Angel Moroni.

A Frame of Fire

It didn't occur to me until after the fact that my mother's hair would make the perfect frame for this leaf up Millcreek Canyon in October of 2022. By this point it had become a kind of mini-project to capture various friends and family holding fall leaves, but this image is the best example of the perfect harmony between the person and the leaf.

Bubbles! Bubbles! Bubbles!

When we gave my youngest niece a bubble machine for her second birthday, I envisioned a transcendent portrait shoot where she would play in a sea of bubbles that floated down from above her as one of her sisters held the machine out of frame. But when we tried to bring my vision to life, my niece was having none of it. She insisted on holding the machine herself, even if the bubbles that shot up into her face left her blinking and confused. Somehow in the midst of her defiance, confusion, and discomfort, I managed to get a few pictures--including this image--that kinda, sorta approximated what I had in mind.