Category Archives: From the Camera

Add One of Ike, Too

23 July, 2010

What started with a lens and camera calibration check is turning out to be a full fledged family portrait project. I think these photographs really capture personality as well as the look of each person at this point in our lives.

Here’s the five-year-old, Ike. Next will be to catch the elusive critter, Zoë Ingrid.

Also posted in Family Life | 1 Comment

And My Lovely Wife

16 July, 2010

Put the camera on my lovely wife and got this. Ten years this coming January.

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A New Look

16 July, 2010

I’ve been toying with making some changes to the beard, which has gone basically unaltered for more than a decade, actually for almost twenty years. So, after buying some Doobie Brothers vinyl yesterday, I decided to grab my clippers and carve a little 70s out of my face.

I went about my business today, and a really curious thing happened. Tons of people in town and up at the reservoir and all over started talking to me about fishing and cars and guy stuff. It’s like this new look is professor camo. I might keep it.

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Zion National Park, Zhang Yimou-Style

11 May, 2010

For those of you who haven’t been following my recent exploits, early summer is when I start doing my Partners in the Parks projects. Partners is a program I run with my colleague Matt Nickerson, the Southern Utah University honors director. The gist of it is this: we take college honors students to national parks for a week at a time. They hike, learn from professors and rangers about park management and resources, and really get a deep experience instead of a four hour drive through, which is common for most Americans.

We’re funded through a National Parks Service grant, and we get some pretty amazing access. This summer I’ll be leading or advising projects in Zion National Park, Grand Canyon-Parashant (in the remote NW section of the Grand Canyon, and Denali National Park in Alaska. We’ll also be exploring new possibilities for projects in Olympic National Park in Washington, Great Basin, King’s Canyon, and Sequoia. We also have projects that I am not directly overseeing in Cape Hatteras and Manhattan (many are unaware of the many, many urban NPS sites).

For the last two days I’ve been hiking through an upper section of Zion National Park, called Kolob Canyons. This morning we awoke to snow. We knew it was coming, but we sort of hoped we’d be wrong about that. It made for a miserable slog: lots of mud and being cold, but it was spellbindingly beautiful.

I kept expecting to see Chinese warriors flying overhead with spears and flowing silk robes, engaging in silent battle between the sandstone ramparts and the mist.

Today was hard going, but it was very beautiful. It was a good day, all in all, because I had good gear, I was in pretty good shape, and I was at work.

Also posted in Campus Life, Rave | 0 Comments

The Children’s Parade of Nightmares

05 December, 2009

Our town has a very strange tradition of whacked parades. This year’s Children’s Christmas Parade was deliriously psychotic. But don’t take my word for it. In particular, watch out for the lobster (words to live by, huh?).

Sleep well.

Also posted in Strangeness | 1 Comment

Anything Goes

13 October, 2007

Cole Porter was right. “In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked at as something shocking, now heaven knows…Anything Goes.” More than that marketing seems to know everything and nothing at the same time. They haven’t a shred of decency at all. That we know, that we know.

So, today I was in the Wal-Mart, getting chewable Tylenol and two things of photocopy paper, and I walk past a candy display, seemingly innoccuous. Upon closer inspection, I noticed a product that was at once so, absolutely hip to popular culture, and so utterly without shame that I felt what I can only call the Postmodern Sublime.

Elvis Peanut Butter Cups

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Ikey’s Big Steps

30 June, 2006

I realize that I’ve not been keeping people up with the progress of the young sportsman. Well, as you can see he’s terrorizing the house.

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Oh, And Don’t Forget Big Sister

30 June, 2006

Zoë was a little upset that her brother’s screen test was so successful. So here’s her little routine, cooked up to make sure she holds onto her alpha spot.

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Uncanny America

16 September, 2005

Barbie

Click on image for Barbie detail.

I recount the following conversation I had with my daughter as I was getting out of the Jeep to take the above photograph:

Zoë was yelling at me, “What are you doing, Dad?”

I told her I was taking a picture of this truck.

She asked why, and I said, “Because there is a Barbie head in the front seat.” She said, “What’s a Barbie?”

And I said, “You’re a good girl.”

This kind of moment (in which I revere my daughter for not recognizing an American icon) is pretty closely related to the fact that I am almost obscenely proud of the fact that I have never been to Disneyland (or world). Neither has my wife.

As far as I am concerned, this bundle of truths makes my family perfect.

The baby doesn’t value anything that won’t fit into his mouth. The three-year-old doesn’t know who Barbie is, calls broccoli her favorite food, and won’t sculpt with the colored clay because it’s for “babies.”

This sounds like something someone must have said once, but we are best defined by those things we reject, or maybe also by the things we secretly love. I love Velveeta and picante sauce, the TV show Scrubs, and comic books.

What do you reject? What do you secretly love and hope no one will ever discover?

Posted in From the Camera | 5 Comments

Read with a child for 20 minutes a day

20 December, 2004

Yesterday while coming back from my grandmother’s 90th birthday party, I found this guy enjoying a little quality time with his boy, while they were waiting to board. If you start them early with soft core porn in the form of a men’s lifestyle magazine, they will never turn from it.

Max

Getting this shot, by the way, was really dang tough. I had to pretend like I was just showing my mother some shots of the family, when I was really trying to get a steady shot with a 1/16 of a second shutter speed, maximum zoom.

Posted in From the Camera | 2 Comments