A Show of Support

I didn't make it up to the Utah State Capitol in time to photograph the building lit up in yellow and blue in support of Ukraine after the Eastern European nation was invaded by Russia in February of 2022. But I did get there the next night in time to get a few images of the Ukrainian flag that flew at the capitol until sundown that evening. The relentless 24/7 news cycle has made it easy to dismiss various tragedies around the world at times, especially in recent years, but my memories of the fall of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s made this invasion resonate a little more.

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.

Run, Funko, Run

I had noticed a few amusing Funko Pop interpretations of favorite pop culture characters while browsing Amazon over the years, but I felt inspired to start my own collection until I saw that the company had made a figure of a running Forrest Gump from his 1994 movie. Since I had been passing Forrest Gump Point on a yearly basis for a few years, it occurred to me that I might be able to stage a most appropriate portrait shoot. The image here actually came from my second attempt at the shoot, on the way home from Monument Valley after a heavy snowstorm.